Reviews

Night in Shanghai by Nicole Mones

reader_fictions's review

3.0

Fairly recently, I read Three Souls by Janie Change, which touched on this same time period, the 1930s through the early parts of World War II, in China. While I’ve read a lot set in that time period, the Chinese setting was almost entirely new. In addition to Three Souls, I’d read a book, The Far Side of the Sky, a couple of years ago, which is about Jewish refugees in Shanghai. Night in Shanghai takes an entirely new perspective on the war and 1930s China, and is an intensely dark and thought-provoking read.

Read the full review at A Reader of Fictions.

readalot662f9's review

2.0

I've become interested in the period between the wars and the chaos in (Communists, Nationalists, Japanese) at the time, so I really, really wanted to like this book. The sense of place was well developed, but the characters seemed hollow to me. Forbidden love, African American and Chinese ofwoman, but nothing that made them seem like real people. And the unknown Holocaust story seemed like it was tossed in just to bring to light an unknown episode in history. Perhaps that should have been its own novel. That part made it seem to me that the story about Thomas and I've already forgotten her name was written just to tell the Holocaust story