Donna D

This was a difficult book to rate because, while it was slow getting going, I loved the central character, and was led to think a lot about the history and culture of Vietnam from a very new perspective. Since I had many peers who faced the draft during the Vietnam war, my previous exposure to the history and culture was a very westernized version and centered on wartime issues. This novel cast things in a very different light and Gibbs very effectively used Hung, the aging pho vendor, to draw the reader through Vietnam's turbulent late colonial, wartime, and post-war periods, always from the point of view of a poor North Vietnamese man who became educated and heavily influenced by the artists and intellectuals who frequented his pho shop. While vacationing in Vietnam, Gibbs was inspired to write this work, by a young tour guide who allowed her to question him, sharing his thoughts and aspirations. She did a nice job presenting the setting, developed a marvelous main character, but fell just a bit short in the secondary characters and developed a somewhat forced conclusion to the story.

I was delighted to have the opportunity to preview this novel, written as the memoir of a prestigious ballerina who has a life-long affair with the last czar of Russia. The novel appears to have been very well-researched. If anything, I felt that Adrienne Sharp was overly ambitious in presenting so much detail of the history of the fall of the Romanovs. I really struggled through the first half of the book, which read more like a textbook than a novel. Things picked up in the second half, but the rather lifeless characters failed to rescue the novel.

Historical fiction presents the challenge of drawing the reader in without deviating too far from the facts, and Sharp was just not daring enough in giving her characters some personality. Once Mathilde becomes a mother, her ambition and love for her son breathes some life into her, and the reader is more drawn in. Sharp's portrayal of the city of Petersburg and the inner circle of the aristocracy are sometimes captivating. This was a novel with potential that just came up a little bit short in engaging my interest.