The Emperor of Shoes

April 16, 2018
In Wise’s dynamic debut, the American heir to a shoe manufacturing company comes of age in southern China and has a crisis of conscience among factory workers fighting for their rights. Alex Cohen is in China to learn the ropes of his father’s shoe company. While there, he meets and falls for Ivy, a member of an activist group hoping to start a union among the workers. Alex wants to support her cause, as he knows that workers are being exploited at the factory. But his father is pressuring him to fall in line and step into his new management role. Then a government official asks Alex to bring him the names of the union organizers, Alex finds himself at a crossroads. When an opportunity comes for him to start fresh with a company that would treat its workers with dignity and generosity, but will he take it or will he bow to the pressure to maintain the status quo? Wise’s well-paced novel moves inexorably forward with functional but never brilliant prose. While Wise resists simplifying the story by contrasting the life experiences of Alex and Ivy, readers will be more interested in Ivy and wish more time had been dedicated to her version of events. Wise, who has worked in his own family’s shoe factory in southern China, skillfully depicts the interdependent yet strained relationship between Chinese factory workers and foreign capital in this revealing story.

May 15, 2018

East meets West in this accomplished debut novel about globalization, capitalist exploitation of workers, and father/son relationships. Wise does many things right here. The central relationship--between a blustery, old-school family patriarch who is manufacturing shoes in China and his much quieter, idealistic son, Alex, who is inheriting the Cohen family business--is handled with great warmth and humor. Father and son clash over working conditions at the factory, and Wise handles the many complexities at play in this conflict with nuance and subtlety. Alex falls in love with a young Chinese woman named Ivy who is a political activist trying to improve conditions in factories, and their skillfully drawn relationship drives much of the action in the novel. Wise explores the situation's political, economic, and moral complexities with considerable skill, alert to the many ways that entrenched power and wealth perpetuate inequality and oppression. The only weak element is the unlikely happy ending of a political situation that is deeply cynical, corrupt, and fearless in using violence to oppress workers. VERDICT An impressive debut; recommended for readers interested in globalization, diversity, and social justice.--Patrick Sullivan, Manchester Community Coll., CT

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

May 1, 2018
Since the day of his birth, Boston-born Alex Cohen has been expected to follow in his father's footsteps and run the family shoe factory in southern China.Now 26, Alex is caught between his desire to oversee a company where workers are respected and operations follow the latest energy efficiency standards and, at the same time, keep his money-worshipping father happy. It's impossible. Dad is almost a caricature, soulless, greedy, opportunistic, and crass. He's proud that his sweatshop is highly profitable and that his merchandise is sold in countless U.S. department stores. He's also pleased by his ability to ingratiate himself with the corrupt, easily bribed politicians who are happy to look the other way on health and safety standards. At first, Alex finds his father's modus operandi simply disagreeable. But after a worker kills herself because she can no longer take the constant abuse meted out by the company's hard-driving overseers, Alex realizes that things have to change, and fast. As he gets to know Ivy, a somewhat older college-educated worker who intends to organize the plant, and then becomes romantically entangled with her, he not only learns about the international struggle for human rights, but has to parse for himself the never-ending debate over whether nonviolence can succeed in creating social change. The legacy of the 1989 massacre in Tiananmen Square is vividly rendered, and Ivy's eyewitness account leaves Alex shaken. In concert with his employee's suicide, it also helps propel the inevitable confrontation between father and son. The showdown is tense, if predictable, and leaves both men with a clear understanding that business as usual is no longer possible. Although this is a fascinating look at China's race for economic growth, the Jewish businessman stereotype is unsettling and makes this first novel less compelling than it could be.Though this book can be nuanced and engaging, it's ultimately disappointing.

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April 15, 2018
Alex Cohen is being groomed to take over the family business, the Tiger Step Shoe Factory, in Foshan, China. The factory has relied on cheap labor to manufacture casuals for the masses back in the U.S., but sales are starting to flag, and Alex has his own ideas about taking the business in a new direction. At the same time, his interest in Ivy, a seamstress, leads him to explore the China outside his father's circuit of the factory and the Intercontinental Hotel. Ivy belongs to an underground group that wants to stage a one-day strike at the factory, but after Alex agrees to lend his support, he is enlisted by the local party boss to help root out radicals. The more Alex learns about how workers are treated, the more he questions where his loyalties should lie. Wise's debut offers a fascinating look at contemporary China, but its greatest strength is the struggle between a hard-to-please father bent on preserving what he has worked so hard to build and a son who is trying to find his own way.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)