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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
26 of 27 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Daughters of the River Huong helps readers to learn of Vietnam rich history,
By
This review is from: Daughters of the River Huong (2005 publication) (Perfect Paperback)
Daughter of the River Huong is a great story. It is very well written. It made me paused occassionally to think about of the events that Ms. Uyen(Judge Uyen!!) lead us to the earlier rich history of Vietnam, which I do not know much of.
I hope this story will make to a movie or film someday near future. If you appreciate the history of Vietnam, this is a book for you. I can't help when reading the book that Vietnam, as a country been through set back and suprised opportunities via the past century, colonized by the French, and last America get to where they are today of the economic opportunity. The story is a heart broken but also revealed of the tenacious woman who is determined to define her own destination. Tony T. Tran San Francisco, CA
27 of 29 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Daughters of the River Huong,
By
This review is from: Daughters of the River Huong (2005 publication) (Perfect Paperback)
DAUGHTERS OF THE RIVER HUONG: A Vietnamese royal concubine and her descendants by Uyen Nicole Duong
ISBN 1-928928-16-I, U.S.:RavensYard Publishing, Ltd, Trade paperback, 271 pp. SRP $17.95 Uyên Nicole D??ng's "Daughters of the River H??ng: A Vietnamese royal concubine & her descendants" is a historical work that I've just discovered and feel compelled to say is among the ranks of great contemporary epic novels. If it weren't for the fictionalized aspect of this true-to-life love story, it could well be an interestingly humanist, thoroughly researched female study that delves into a century of tumultuous history in Vi?t Nam: from French colonial time to the revolutionary struggle for independence to today's socialist cum capitalist society. Hers is a refreshing voice adding to our understanding of the Vietnam conflict. While good writers transcend their geographical origins with the universality of the human condition, their literary style depends in large measure on the skillful hand of translators. D??ng's original English work faces no such barrier; her poetic prose stands on its own. Yet, few of the current Vietnamese American writers have lived through the period that they have written about, nor have the breadth of their novels reached the historical scope or touched the height of human emotion as this work. What separates it from her earlier contemporaries, such as B?o Ninh's "The Sorrow of War" and D??ng Thu H??ng's "Paradise of the Blind," is her novel's mass appeal. What we have here is the making of a movie that spans four generations and three continents, from present-day Manhattan to ancient Hu? to romantic Paris, to Texas, and back to Sài Gòn. The book, from RavensYard Publishing, progresses from the French empire in Vi?t Nam to the dying days of colonialism, when descendants of royal concubine Huy?n Phi began to take roots in the mystical Violet City of Hu?, to the American involvement and its untimely debacle. At the center of the action, the main character transforms from a humble paddle girl on the river H??ng to matriarch of her bloodline. The novel's early plot reminds us of "The Year of Living Dangerously" and "The Killing Fields," in which brave and endearing foreign reporters stay back to witness the fall of the city, as it changes hands, as well as to see the plight of the people. In this case, Christopher Sanders, an American journalist with a major news network from New York, is the hero who saved the beautiful and virginal Vietnamese Lolita from an uncertain fate and brought her to his country. The tale of survival is told from several women's point of views, all inexorably connected to the uncrowned empress Huy?n Phi and her extinct kingdom of Champa. Multigenerational as the saga maybe, the heroine shines as the thread that links all her descendants' trials and tribulation and helps make sense of their complex history. No doubt, the scholarly and methodical training of the author's law background helped her to structure her work, with the result being a systematic, albeit cinematic, presentation of nuances and themes. I cannot help but think of this story as autobiographical, given the parallel in the author's life and the beautiful and hopeless romantic Si (or Mi Uyên) as the novel's heroine. So much so that readers of the Occident camp may want to claim her (the heroine, not the author) as their own given her unabashed and persistent love for her French Romeo (Andre Foucault) and her wish to rejoin her benign American husband (Christopher Sanders). "Why did you come to me in New York City? You owed me no obligation..." "Because," I (Si) whispered, "I wanted to know with certainty I had boarded the plane." Somewhere I still heard the angry roaring sound of the last helicopter atop the U.S. Embassy... Standing in the heart of the new Saigon I began to rediscover my feelings for Andre, persistent and haunting since childhood... He was the only one outside of the culture who understood the bond between my soul and those of all the women in my bloodline." Perhaps her book, through its first person narrative, would speak directly to those secret fantasy and dark yearnings, while readers of the Asian camp may wonder why - except for an ephemeral treatment of emperor Thu?n Thành - other Asian male characters take such minor and roles in her book. Yet the appeal is precisely that transcendental need for empathy which reaches across cultural and geographical boundaries in spite of its nationalist fervor that's steep in folklore. This universal theme of love and loss, of eternal waiting, of heroic female struggles becomes the cry, wailing out for human connection in our war-weary world. Nguyen-Khoa Thai Anh
11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Beautifully written family saga of colonialism, war, and love,
By
This review is from: Daughters of the River Huong (Paperback)
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
The book starts with two failed "marriages", one in the early 20th century between the puppet king of Viet Nam and his "Mystique Concubine", the other at the end of the century between the concubine's great grand daughter and the older man whom she seduced into getting her family out of Viet Nam at the end of the war. In between is the story of a line of strong women, princesses reduced to running a silk farm in a village on the River Huong, the perfumed river that runs through the book, contrasting the sensuous beauty of Viet Nam with the brutality of the endless war. It is both beautifully written and an easy, smooth read. The women of the different generations are easy to keep straight. I'm glad to know from other reviewers that there are apparently even better books about women in Viet Nam during the war; this one is certainly moving, subtle, and well-crafted.
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