The Seventh Moon [Mass Market Paperback]

Marius Gabriel (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 30, 2001

As World War II rages, Francine Lawrence and her small daughter, Ruth, wait in the fading splendor of Raffles Hotel in Singapore for Francine's British husband. But when he is delayed, Francine, half-Chinese and unwelcome there, is forced to begin a terrifying journey.

Seeking to escape a world exploding in nightmare, Francine ultimately makes a gut-wrenching decision: to entrust Ruth to strangers in order to save the child's life. But when the war ends, all traces of Ruth have vanished; years of searching bring only heartbreak.

Three decades later Francine is a formidable businesswoman, pouring all her energies into her companies. Then one day a soft-spoken young woman walks into her New York office on the Festival of the Hungry Ghosts.

Her name is Sakura, and she hints that she may be Francine's daughter. What Francine does not know is that beneath Sakura's calm surface lives the heart of a warrior. Francine cannot begin to imagine the places Sakura has been, the horrors she has endured -- or the secret that gives her the strongest motive in the world to lie....

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

A suspenseful blend of wartime adventures and history, Gabriel's highly atmospheric, labyrinthine saga of international politics and lost families features a hardy heroine confronted by the daughter she's long believed dead. Now 48, self-made millionaire Francine Lawrence is a survivor of WWII. In flashbacks to 1941, she is a young Eurasian mother whose English husband, the manager of a Malay tin mine, disappears when the Japanese attack. Francine and her four-year-old daughter, Ruth, are installed in a hotel in Singapore, but their precarious situation is exacerbated by racial discrimination. Besieged by Europeans who want rooms, the hotel manager evicts Francine and her child. Francine has no choice but to accept rescue by a persistent suitor, Major Clive Napier. They wangle passage on a dilapidated junk, hoping to get to Java, but after a harrowing voyage (a bombing and a typhoon), they come ashore in Borneo. There, the couple are forced to leave Ruth, who is too sick to travel, with friendly natives. Eventually, after they have made their way to freedom, Francine hears that Ruth was bayoneted by invading Japanese soldiers. More than two decades later, Sakura Ueda walks into Francine's posh Manhattan office, claiming to be her long-lost daughter. At this point the scope of the novel expands, and the plot line shifts to the internecine policies of Laos in the early '70s, involving drug lords, the CIA, the U.S. government and the Pathet Lao. The author burdens Sakura with an impenetrably tangled, tragic history: a childhood in the Bornean jungle and in Tokyo with a Japanese war criminal who later commits seppuku, an adolescence of isolation and poverty and an adulthood marked by gang rape, run-ins with Laotian gangsters, heroin dealing, the kidnapping of her baby and tuberculosis. The narrative is most effective when Gabriel (House of Many Rooms) focuses on Francine and on her skeptical, defensive and complicated feelings toward Sakura, whom she believes is an impostor out for her "mother"'s millions. Though the heroic, violent climax is unnecessarily complicated, Francine's and Sakura's revelatory emotional meltdown is poignant. (Dec.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

In this novel, Gabriel (House of Many Rooms) tries unsuccessfully to infuse some imagination into an age-old plot. During the bombing of Singapore by the Japanese, Francine Lawrence, a young Eurasian mother, must leave her daughter behind in order to save both herself and the child. Thirty years later, she encounters a woman claiming to be that long-lost child. The novel spends the next 300 pages in a back-and-forth, yes-she-is, no-she-isn't volley of truths and half-truths. Despite some exotic locales, the daughter, Ruth, a.k.a. Sakura, seems strangely flat and lifeless. There's little real suspense, and it's hard to feel much sympathy for either Francine or her self-proclaimed daughter; each has had her share of romantic entanglements, but these relations seem uninspired and dreary. The novel manages to pull off a somewhat climactic last few pages, but it comes too late. A marginal purchase for larger fiction collections only.AMargaret Ann Hanes, Sterling Heights P.L., MI
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Mass Market Paperback: 432 pages
• Publisher: Bantam; Reprint edition (January 30, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0553572318
• ISBN-13: 978-0553572315
• Product Dimensions: 4.2 x 1 x 7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,556,414 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Never read anything like this before!, December 1, 1999

By 

Anne de Ridder (Belgium) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Seventh Moon (Hardcover)

This was a very unusual book. I've never read anything quite so intense. I was completely swept away by the story, which covers the most exotic locations and events imaginable. But basically, the main issue is, what happens to a little girl abandoned in the middle of a raging war? Does she survive, and go on to become something her mother could never dream of? Or is that impossible?

This is the question Francine has to answer when, almost thirty years after the end of the war, a strange young woman comes along claiming to be her long-lost daughter. And Sakura is a wonderful character, whether you love her or hate her (I started out hating her and ended up loving her) The two characters are so very different you think they are going to tear each other apart, and the climax is just mind-blowing. It had me crying, and I NEVER cry over books or movies. I highly recommend this book if you're tired of reading the same old tired story every time!

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Beautifully written and heart-rending, December 14, 1999

By 

Ona - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Seventh Moon (Hardcover)

Two things struck me about this novel. One was the quality of the writing, which is very high, and the other was the amount of passion put into it by the author.

I had never heard of Marius Gabriel before. I purchased this book on the strength of an extract which I read here at Amazon, and I was delighted with my "discovery." He writes in a lucid, vivid style that makes reading a pleasure (I am very fussy) and with a depth of feeling that makes it hard to believe he is a man (no offense, but it is VERY rare to find a male author who can get so completely under the skin of his female characters). Reading THE SEVENTH MOON was like having a very sane friend tell you about a very insane world.

My only complaint is that the story was heart-rending. I won't give the ending away here, but all the characters have their lives turned inside-out by the time the last hair-raising page is turned. I was going to take off a star for all the tears I shed, but found it hard to punish this author.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Well written and engrossing, July 8, 2001

By 

Tracy Rowan "dargelos" (Chicago, IL USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 500 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: The Seventh Moon (Mass Market Paperback)

Not entirely a romance, not wholly a thriller or a mystery, THE SEVENTH MOON is a gripping mixture of all three that takes us from Singapore on the eve of the Japanese invasion to New York, Hong Kong and Laos in the early 70s in a tale about a woman's attempts to deal with the fate of her only child.

Early in World War II, as the Japanese overrun Malaysia, Francine Lawrence flees Singapore with her lover and her young daughter, Ruth. But Ruth is too sick to finish the dangerous journey, and Francine is forced to leave her with strangers for her own sake. After the war, Francine returns to find the child, but Ruth has vanished and the tribe she was with has been slaughtered by the Japanese. Thirty years later, the appearance of a young woman who may or may not be Ruth reopens all the old wounds. Sakura Ueda has secrets so dark and horrifying Francine can barely imagine them, and every reason to lie about who she is. Yet in the wasteland that has become Francine's heart, something is touched by the presence of Sakura, and Francine finds herself compelled to make one last, fearful journey in the hope of finding the truth and reclaiming her family.

THE SEVENTH MOON is a wonderfully well-crafted book, the sort that makes the actual physical act of reading a pleasure. It caught me almost from the first, and carried me straight through 300-odd pages without a hitch or a slow-down anywhere. The theme is universal: the love of a mother for her child, played out not once but twice, and framed by a pair of love affairs born out of need, and a hunger for some human warmth in a cold world. Gabriel, skillfully balancing these parallel histories, keeps his narrative tight, tense and involving straight through to the end. I never quite knew where he was going to go with this story, a quality which always makes me want to shout "halleluiah!" since so many genres have become numbingly predictable. If occasionally I found certain characters a little over-done, or perhaps a bit redundant in some situations, the problems were minor by comparison to the richness these characters brought to the narrative as a whole. Compelling in their weakness as well as their strength, they are entirely human and it's easy to identify with them. Their histories inform their characters, and exotic as they are, those histories feel genuine. There are few false steps here, and the ones I found seem unimportant by comparison to the vividness of the narrative.

Gabriel has the gift of telling a story of love and loss without resorting to pathos, the ability to describe terror without resorting to gore, and the knack for eroticism without vulgarity. THE SEVENTH MOON is a hard-to-put-down novel I would recommend to almost anyone who is looking for something more than just a little mind-candy.