My Last Empress

August 20, 2012
Chen's (Brothers) 19th-century tale of obsession explores the line between love and madness. After Samuel Pickens's first love, Annabelle, perishes in a fire a month into their adolescent romance, her spirit stays with him through Yale and beyond, an invisible partner who reigns over him. Later, an adult Pickens acquires a position as tutor to the teenage emperor of China's Qing Dynasty and travels to the country where his beloved spent her childhood. There, he finds a royal palace overrun with corrupt eunuchs and led by a callow and unprepared emperor. Pickens is soon befriended by his effeminate pupil, but the tutor becomes enamored with 13-year-old Empress Qiu Rong, fourth wife of the emperor and Annabelle's doppelgänger. Their ensuing perverse love affair is complicated by the schemes of various parties, but together they navigate the traps set for them, seeking assistance from a local warlord and other shady individuals. Steeped in the language and colors of an Asia long gone, this florid, Lolita-esque tale focuses too narrowly on the narrator's lost love and misses its potential to be a sweeping historical epic. Agent: Alex Glass, Trident Media Group.

Starred review from October 15, 2012
Nabokov meets Dream of the Red Chamber. Chen (Brothers, 2006, etc.), a Chinese-born writer and now resident of New York's Hudson Valley, has a profoundly developed feel for the sweep of history--though here, unlike in Brothers, he compresses what might have been a saga into 300 pages. His story has an epic feel all the same: Samuel Pickens, a Yankee born into wealth and privilege, falls into head-swooning love with the daughter of a New England missionary who has spent her youth in China. Alas, their young love is fleeting, but events pull Samuel across the ocean and into a web of mystery, not least the fact that, years later, Samuel comes into contact with a young woman in the imperial court who looks very strangely like his lost love. The discovery turns Samuel's world upside down, of course. Chen is a master of suggestion by telling detail: Of the man who teaches Samuel Chinese, for example, he writes, "No one had taught us more with less," while Samuel's plans first come a cropper with a potential employer's being "choked to death by butterflies in his throat"--a neat allusion to Madama Butterfly there, perhaps. Chen sets up the enigma that Samuel must decipher before the first act closes, and though the solution isn't deeply buried, he takes his time in uncovering it elegantly. For those with an eye for such things, Chen also does a nice job of serving up literary erotica of a sort to do Colette proud: "Then she rode with gentleness, as if the horse beneath her was trotting on a soft path; her rosebud breasts heaved and her hair tossed with each motion." A lyrical tale of crossed borders, boundaries and destinies, expertly told.

COPYRIGHT(2012) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

October 1, 2012

Author of the best-selling memoir Colors of the Mountain, Da Chen sets the principal action of his latest novel amid the corruption of 19th-century China. The plot gathers momentum when narrator Samuel Pickens leaves New England for China to become the young emperor's chief tutor. Among the emperor's consorts, Pickens encounters Qio Rong, who strongly resembles his teenage lover, Annabelle. Annabelle's ghost has been driving him mad since her tragic death during a youthful tryst. Pickens at first resists his lust for Qio, but their eventual affair places them in opposition to a court dominated by lies, thievery, and murder. Interestingly, the couple seeks protection from a warlord with a surprising connection to Annabelle. VERDICT Da Chen has written a wonderful tale of passionate obsession. Pickens's desire for the youthful Qio won't suit everyone's taste, but the prose is elegantly inviting, and Pickens's insane fixation on reincarnating Annabelle will hold readers' fascination to the end. Recommended.--Faye A. Chadwell, Oregon State Univ. Libs., Corvallis

Copyright 2012 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

August 1, 2012
A nineteenth-century Yankee blueblood from an upright Connecticut family finds his world upended when he is captivated by an exotically free-spirited young girl. After engaging in a whirlwind affair with Annabelle, a missionary's daughter who had been raised in China, Samuel Pickens is heartbroken when she dies in a tragic accident. Annabelle's spirit torments Samuel and compels him to travel to China, where he works as tutor-advisor to the emperor. Still obsessed by the memory of Annabelle, he falls for her Orientaldoppelganger, Empress Qiu Rong. As Samuel and Q eventually discover, their clandestine romance is only one of many secrets embedded within the labyrinthine walls of the Forbidden City. Chen's lyrical prose enhances and deepens the eerie tone of this atmospheric melodrama.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)