Customer Reviews

An Empire of Women

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AN EMPIRE OF WOMEN is an elegant and poignant novel about three generations of women, none of whom understands the others. Celine Arneaux, a renowned photographer of Chinese and French ancestry, is the would-be matriarch, although she feels little connection to her daughter Sumin, only slightly more to her granddaughter Cam. The three women agree to meet at a cabin in Virginia for the benefit of Apertures magazine, which wants to celebrate the famous photos Celine took of Cam at the site. Cam brings along Alice, the six year old daughter of a Chinese friend, who evokes emotions and desires in the adult women as they struggle to claim her as their own.

Shepard writes with simple precision, with exact and memorable details that give this book life; however, the emotional exploration - the stripping away of the outer layers of each character - gives AN EMPIRE OF WOMEN its depth. The mixed racial backgrounds of the women (Cam, for example, has Chinese, French, and Japanese blood) serves as a metaphor for their complicated and often contradictory lives. The closer the women get to the truth about themselves, the more powerful this book becomes. Issues about Communist China and the politics of art further define this story.

Although the natural audience for this novel is women, anyone with an interest in human relations, the politics of art, and good literature should find this a rewarding read.

In this stunning debut offering, author Karen Shepherd tells the story of three very strange, alienated and ultimately cruel women. Celine Arneux, famed photographer -- her daughter Sumin -- and granddaughter Cameron are connected by blood only.

Forget the warm and cozy relationships of Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club. These three women of Chinese heritage are more akin to Madame Mao.

Celine is now retired and living in her beloved Paris. Sumin and her lover Grady live in the states, as do Cameron and her ward, the 6-year old Alice. The four females agree to meet at a cabin in Virginia where Celine took provocative photos of Cameron when she was a child.

Not one relationship in this family is healthy or based on any kind of true respect for its circle. Celine is aloof and cruel to her daughter. Sumin resents the one-time relationship her mother had with Cameron and has never really found her way in the world. Cameron boils over with anger at grandmother for taking such intimate photos of her and at her mother for allowing the photos to be taken. There are so many unresolved issues in this book that one needs a scorecard to keep up with them all.

Add to this caldron of raw anger and emotional immaturity the fate of the young Alice, whose mother has been forced to return to China without her. Each of the three women -- Celine, Sumin and Cameron -- wants to raise Alice and the battle over her future becomes bloody and extremely brutal.

An Empire of Women at once riveted and repulsed me. Although the author does an excellent job of telling the story, the subject matter and its devastation were a bit too much for my taste. The only character who truly evoked sympathy was Celine's Chinese mother -- and my heart broke for her on almost every page.

I look forward to other work from this author. She's got a voice and a gift -- my wish is that she finds something lighter to write about next time around. This story just wore me out.

Had Artaud been a novelist, he might have written a book like Empire of Women.

Mannered, orderly, intensely cruel, this stunning debut novel depicts three generations of women, all single daughters of mothers who never married. The ghostly presence of a fourth woman, the great-grandmother, pervades the book. The deceased Huying, grandmother Celine, mother Sumin, granddaughter Cameron, plus Sumin's journalist lover Grady and six-year-old Alice, daughter of Cameron's best friend, spend a week together at their family cabin in Virginia, ostensibly in order to allow Grady to write a retrospective article about Celine's photography. In reality, the visit's purpose is to decide Alice's fate. Forced to return to China when her student visa ran out, Alice's mother left Alice in Cameron's care, believing that her daughter would be better off in America. While the choice of Cameron as a care-giver makes this a dubious proposition, it is Alice's presence that precipitates revolution in this aptly-titled Empire.

Celine, rich, self-absorbed, famous imagier, of Franco-Chinese descent, rules her empire with an absolute hand, through cruelty, psychological manipulation, and control of the purse strings. Only her granddaughter, Cameron, subject of Celine's famous books of photographs, has ever escaped her grasp. Somehow, at twelve, Cameron's magic disappeared, and Celine has not taken a photograph since then. The woman in the middle, Sumin, Celine's daughter and Cameron's mother, has spent her life waiting, hovering, constantly in the shadow of her famous mother. Just one example shows exactly how dysfunctional this group of women is. Celine, angered by a minor infraction of an eight-year-old Sumin's, locks Sumin in a darkroom. Sumin retaliates by chopping everything she can lay her hands on into bits, by flushing all the photographic chemicals down the sink, and by destroying film, negatives, and prints. This incident is cited as proof, not of Celine's abuse of her daughter, but as an indication of Sumin's "true disturbance."

The case of Cameron, the subject of Celine's odd, semi-erotic, provocative, and stunning photographs, is far darker. "The first time I felt a man put his fingers inside of me, it was like watching someone look through one of our books," she tells Celine. "You gave me to anyone who wanted to look." Later she says, "I can't get myself back." Yet Cameron's hope for salvation through Alice is just as selfish as Celine's exploitation of Cameron, for Cameron (as Celine points out) is not thinking of the child's welfare, but only of her own.

The cultural dismissal of women is a constant subtext throughout the book. Lest anyone believe, since Chinese women are no longer forced to bind their feet, that modern attitudes have conquered oppression, let me recount a true incident. My husband's grandfather wrote the history and ancestry of the Yuan family out for us in English. My son's name is part of this document, but not my daughter's, since she will not be a considered part of the bloodline after she marries. In Empire of Women, Celine gives a piece of jade that should have been passed only to a son, to Alice. Is it a gesture of recognition that the historically poor status of women is changing? Perhaps. Every motivation in Empire is suspect. Every gesture is layered with meaning. This book is an outstanding achievement, and we can only hope for more books from a phenomenal writer.

Read more reviews about women's books at BooksForWomen, an Amazon.com associate site.

Renowned photographer Celine Arneux reached the epitome of fame with her controversial pictures of her family. The collection includes a provocative set of photos of her granddaughter Cameron as a child. Now the wheels of fate have turned. Grady, the lover of Sumin, the middle generation between Celine and Cameron, is doing a magazine article on the celebrated artist and her work. The three women agree to meet in the Virginia cabin site of Celine's most famous work.

Also at the cabin is six-year old Alice, whose guardian is Cameron. The three women, whose relationships between each other are poor, use the child as a battlefield as they battle to gain Alice's affection and the right to claim victory. Any deep reconciliation could mean heartbreak so the child is the pawn and the salvation in this emotional war.

If the reader wants action, they need to pass on AN EMPIRE OF WOMEN. However, if the fan desires a deep look into the emotions of three mixed raced women, this novel is for them. The prime cast is all fully developed and each one's feelings understandable since Karen Shepard deftly peels away their feelings through their actions towards one another and especially towards the child. Alice serves as a final chance at redemption or a final failure. Ms. Shepard will leave her admiring audience to question the impact of his or her heritage.

Harriet Klausner

Talk about a seriously hostile look at familial relationships between women! Disturbing, to be sure, but well-written and thought-provoking.

This book had so much going for it, but I wanted it to be more than it was. The author's writing skills are magnificent. The relationships between the three generations as well as the two outside characters are complex. There is a lot of rich material here including Chinese thought and symbolism I especially found the grandmother's story and interior dialogue sequences compelling. The daughter and granddaughter never fully materialized for me even though there was a lot of dialogue and angst expressed by everyone, as if to spell out the meaning. I found some explanation for the characters' motivation but not entirely and not satisfying enough. I kept waiting for each "ah-ha" moment, and there were many, for it to all make sense, but it never did. Also, the injection of the little girl Alice into the family picture, while supposed to be the key to the family's deliverance, seemed gratuitous. All in all, this is a talented effort that ultimately does not deliver.

Like the revolution that forms the subtext of this book, the story of these women while interesting lacked that crucial element - characterization. The three principles were alternately whining, mean and supremely egotistical. The only one I vaguely sympathized with was the mother, Sumin? (Who could have become a person with a mother like she had?) The other two were not fleshed out enought to illicit any real feelings for them (the grandmother (Celine) at best two dimensional through her historied past - the daughter (Cameron) simply a narcissistic brat.

Perhaps I don't understand the Chinese mind well enough to appreciate the strange stinginess of these characters souls...

Karen Shepard creates an intriguing triad of women, united by images, dreams, and the spoils of unfulfilled dreams. United by a deceptive retrospective article of an aging photographer, three women return to the cabin in the country where Celine Arnaux once created a masterful series of photographs of her granddaughter, Cameron. Accompanied by Celine's daughter Sumin, and Cameron's would-be adopted daughter Alice, the women engage in a week of simmering tension and hidden secrets and ambitions.

Shepard's style is graceful and full of the chiaroscuro that she evokes in the legacy of Celine's photography. Her descriptions are lifelike, and the emotions of her characters are palpable. A quick read, but stirring nonetheless.

Maybe I'm thick but please somebody explain to me how the reviews I read before buying this book are of this tripe. This is the most boring book I've ever read. I couldn't wait to put it down - after 45 tedious pages. Amazon should come up with minus stars rating. I'll be shocked if this review makes it online.