The porcelain moon: a novel of France, the Great War, and forbidden love

The subtitle of the latest by Chang (The Library of Legends, 2020) leaves out the book's most interesting and unique aspect, its focus on the contributions of Chinese people to the war effort. Pauline Deng is a Shanghai native living in Paris as a housekeeper for her uncle and her cousin Theo, who signs on as an interpreter for contract laborers brought from China to the Western front to dig trenches and repair roads for the British and French armies. Assigned to a camp near the small town of Noyelles-sur-Mer, he meets the postal clerk, Camille Roussel. Their burgeoning attraction is complicated by the facts that Theo is Chinese and Camille is married to an abusive war profiteer. When Pauline journeys to Noyelles-sur-Mer to enlist Theo's help in avoiding her arranged marriage, she and Camille join forces. Chang explores themes of racism and sexism and shines a spotlight on this little-known part of the Great War. Refreshingly, the entwined stories have a happy ending. Readers of Jennifer Chiaverini's Switchboard Soldiers (2022) will appreciate Chang's rich historical detail and strong female characters.

The subtitle of the latest by Chang (The Library of Legends, 2020) leaves out the book's most interesting and unique aspect, its focus on the contributions of Chinese people to the war effort. Pauline Deng is a Shanghai native living in Paris as a housekeeper for her uncle and her cousin Theo, who signs on as an interpreter for contract laborers brought from China to the Western front to dig trenches and repair roads for the British and French armies. Assigned to a camp near the small town of Noyelles-sur-Mer, he meets the postal clerk, Camille Roussel. Their burgeoning attraction is complicated by the facts that Theo is Chinese and Camille is married to an abusive war profiteer. When Pauline journeys to Noyelles-sur-Mer to enlist Theo's help in avoiding her arranged marriage, she and Camille join forces. Chang explores themes of racism and sexism and shines a spotlight on this little-known part of the Great War. Refreshingly, the entwined stories have a happy ending. Readers of Jennifer Chiaverini's Switchboard Soldiers (2022) will appreciate Chang's rich historical detail and strong female characters. Copyright 2023 Booklist Reviews.

The Emmy Award—winning Calvi (Dear George, Dear Mary) returns with the story of a young Teddy Roosevelt wooing Boston belle Alice Lee in If a Poem Could Live and Breathe (60,000-copy first printing). Three Souls author Chang goes hardcover with The Porcelain Moon, about a young Chinese woman who flees her uncle's Paris home in 1918 to avoid an arranged marriage, seeking a cousin in the French countryside working with the Chinese Labour Corps and befriending a Frenchwoman who wants quit of her abusive husband (50,000-copy first printing). Set in 1940s Trinidad, when British colonialism and U.S. occupation were folding, Commonwealth Short Story Prize winner Hosein's Hungry Ghosts contrasts the lives of wealthy farm owners Dalton and Marlee Changoor and their impoverished workers, with the plot driven by Dalton's disappearance (100,000-copy first printing). In Code Name Sapphire, from World War II fiction titan Jenoff, Hannah Martel flees Nazi Germany for Brussels and joins the Sapphire Line, which spirits downed Allied airmen to safety; when her cousin Lily's family is slated for deportation, she must decide whether she should risk trying to rescue them (350,000-copy paperback and 10,000-copy hardcover first printing). Best-selling thriller writer Labuskes turns to historical fiction with The Librarian of Burned Books, which moves from U.S. author Althea James's discovery of Nazi resisters in 1933 Berlin to German refugee Hannah Brecht's work at the German Library of Burned Books in 1936 Paris to Vivian Childs's efforts in 1944 New York to block the censorship of the Armed Service Editions, paperbacks shipped to soldiers overseas (100,000-copy paperback and 30,000-copy hardcover first printing). Writing under his father's Lithuanian surname, Maetis, British thriller writer John Matthews takes readers to 1938 Vienna, where members of The Vienna Writers Circle fear that the Anschluss means they won't be able to write and then fear for their very survival (50,000-copy first printing). In Canadian author Marshall's best-selling debut, Angela Creighton's discovery in 2017 of a long-misplaced letter with great import to her family sends her Looking for Jane, with Jane the codename for a network providing illegal abortions in 1970s-80s Toronto. Winner of the Flannery O'Connor Award and National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honors for Bear Down, Bear North: Alaska Stories, Moustakis tries out full-length fiction in Homestead, about a couple named Marie and Lawrence who marry impulsively and then learn about each other while homesteading in Alaska as it nears statehood (75,000-copy first printing). In Pulitzer Prize-winning Verble's Stealing, a Cherokee girl named Kit Crockett is taken from her home in 1950s bayou country and sent to a Christian boarding school intent on expunging her heritage (50,000-copy first printing).