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Liu's impressive fiction debut (her first book was the nonfiction Solitaire) expresses the mingled fear and discomfort with which a woman confronts her heritage-both as a Chinese-American and as the daughter of a renowned wartime photographer. Though narrator Maibelle Chung spent much of her adolescence in New York's Chinatown, she always felt like an outsider because of her red hair and Anglo features. Now 28 and trying to follow her father's vocation as a photographer Maibelle is torn by unresolved conflicts. She decides that to preserve ``face,'' she must revisit the community of her youth. An acquaintance from her past, Tommy Wah, invites her to contribute images to a book he is writing on Chinatown's insularity; as Maibelle is welcomed back to their old neighborhood, she muses on a mentor who called her Caucasian mother the ``White Witch'' and encouraged her to marry Tommy, to break the witch's spell. Different spellings of Maibelle's name, including the Chinese ``Mei-bi'' and Americanized `Maibee,'' suggests the character's uncertainty about her identity. Yet Maibelle's constant ambivalence and the disjointed, episodic narrative make it difficult for the reader to feel empathy. Liu gets to the heart of her tale when Maibelle calls the old Chinese custom of footbinding ``torture,'' and a friend replies that ``in China passion and pain could not be separated.'' Though Liu's lyrical prose is graceful and evocative, real passion and pain seldom penetrate this narrative. Author tour. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

When Maibelle Chung was growing up, she knew she was different, but hers was a difference with a twist. Only part Chinese, with curly red hair and green eyes, she felt distinctly out of place in New York's Chinatown. Though still haunted by inexplicable nightmares seemingly connected with her youth, Maibelle is reluctantly drawn back to the city she has been avoiding and begins investigating her past. She reestablishes an uneasy relationship with her dysfunctional family-her Chinese father, once a famed photojournalist and now a reclusive putterer; her Wisconsin-born mother, whose marriage was meant to be an exotic escape; and a wacky brother and sister-and reawakens painful memories as she takes out her long-abandoned camera to help her brother's estranged boyhood friend prepare a book on Chinatown. Maibelle's past is indeed a tangled mess, and the resolution of her troubles is confusing; there's simply too much going on. But this first novel is vividly told, and it offers an enticingly different slant on America's multicultural heritage. Most libraries should consider.-Barbara Hoffert, "Library Journal" (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

The power of this enchanting debut novel lies in the evanescence of reality and the stealth of truth. Over a decade after she went public with her account of anorexia nervosa (Solitaire, 1979), Liu breaks into fiction with the story of a young woman's search for identity in a complex maze of fact, fiction, nightmares, dreams, history, fantasy, hope, lies, and loss. As the daughter of a half-Chinese father and a white mother, Maibelle grew up feeling like an outcast in Manhattan's Chinatown. She was tall and redheaded, their apartment smelled of the French cuisine her mother insisted on cooking instead of the garlic and dried shrimp of her neighbors' homes, and she knew nothing of her heritage since her father never breathed a word of his past in Shanghai. But when breaking all family ties and traveling cross-country after college fails to quell the nightmares that have plagued her sleep since high school, Maibelle returns to New York to confront her past. She probes her father to discover why he gave up his successful photojournalism career when his Life magazine covers of the Pacific theater during WW II could have brought his family much more fame and money than his small-time inventions. She tells off her manipulative, art-gallery-running mother, who expects her to follow in her father's footsteps and become the famous photographer he should have been. She sifts through memories like her first love, her first death, summers on her grandparents' Wisconsin farm, the old man who taught her Chinese characters, and many mesmerizing folk tales. And she comes face to face with the people of Chinatown while working on a book project documenting their culture. All the pieces of the heroine's disjointed history create a beautiful mess that comes together at the last moment. Delicate, lyrical, mysterious.