I've seen lots of reviews lately for a new coming-of-age book set in China called Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth, by Xiaolu Guo. It's about Fenfang, a young Chinese woman who moves from her rural town to make her life in Beijing. The book's publisher calls it "at once wry and moving," and sayd that it "gives us a clear-eyed glimpse into the precarious and fragile state of China’s new identity and asserts Xiaolu Guo as her generation’s voice of modern China."
Booking Mama reviewed Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth earlier this month and enjoyed it a great deal.
Entertainment Weekly gave the book an A- and calls it "an engrossing portrait of a charmingly chaotic young woman".
The Chicago Sun-Times says, "Twenty Fragments resembles a Chekhov story in containing, under its brief, chatty surface, an enormous world. Here is modern China, struggling to belong to the 21st century while still tied to fascism and Communism. And here is a universal story of a young woman figuring out who she is, and deciding, despite the machinations of bad boyfriends and noisy neighbors, what she really wants. It's a little book that's so moving, you'll want to read it twice."
I'd guess that this book is enjoying a nice spike after the summer Olympics. Can anyone else weigh in?
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