Laura Joh Rowland has wowed me with another of her stories. I was interested in reading The Cloud Pavilion because of Sana Ichiro, the main character. I first met him in The Red Chrysanthemum, when he was a powerful detective in the Tokugawa regime. In this book, he has risen to become Chamberlain, a position…
Peony, the protagonist in Peony in Love, is a pampered sixteen year old when the reader meets her. She is sequestered in the Chen household with female family members and knows nothing of men beyond her relationship with her father. She is betrothed to a man she has never met and during a performance put…
Ghana provides a vivid, if sometimes chaotic setting for this second novel by Marilyn Heward Mills. The main characters are four women who are transplanted from Europe. Three are married and two are raising children. The fourth has children, but is not married and fights an ongoing battle with the children’s father, who is lax…
In most of the Caribbean novels I have read, the narrator is a son of the soil. In The White Woman on the Green Bicycle the main characters are George and Sabine Harwood. The couple arrive from England in 1956, prior to the People’s National Movement’s ascendance to power. Sabine expects they will depart in…