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Book Reviewed by:From the author of The Welsh Girl comes a groundbreaking, provocative new novel.
Sly, funny, intelligent, and artfully structured, The Fortunes recasts American history through the lives of Chinese Americans and reimagines the multigenerational novel through the fractures of immigrant family experience.
Inhabiting four lives - a railroad baron's valet who unwittingly ignites an explosion in Chinese labor, Hollywood's first Chinese movie star, a hate-crime victim whose death mobilizes Asian Americans, and a biracial writer visiting China for an adoption - this novel captures and capsizes over a century of our history, showing that even as family bonds are denied and broken, a community can survive - as much through love as blood.
Building fact into fiction, spinning fiction around fact, Davies uses each of these stories - three inspired by real historical characters - to examine the process of becoming not only Chinese American, but American.
The Fortunes as a whole gives a memorable composite picture of the challenges life has posed for generations of Chinese-Americans. It's like a house of many windows; you may prefer the view from one or two more than the others, but they're all necessary to telling the story of the Asian-American experience...continued
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(Reviewed by Rebecca Foster).
In The Fortunes, one of the main characters is adopting a baby from China. The U.S. Department of State reports that a total of 76,026 children were brought from China to the USA through adoption between 1999 and 2015. Of these, 87.1% were female and 12.9% male – a result of China's historical one-child policy and the frequent abandonment of girls at orphanages. Although China is still among the most popular for inter-country adoption into the United States, the frequency of adoption from another country has declined significantly from its peak in 2004.
International adoptions are controlled by the Hague Convention on Protection of Children and Co-operation in Respect of Intercountry Adoption – the Hague Adoption ...
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If you liked The Fortunes, try these:
by Adrienne Sharp
Published 2019
From the nationally bestselling author of The True Memoirs of Little K, a deeply felt and historically detailed novel of family, loss, and love, told by an irrepressible young girl - the daughter of a two-bit gangster and a movie showgirl - growing up in golden-age Hollywood and Las Vegas in its early days.
by Xhenet Aliu
Published 2019
Told in equally gripping parallel narratives with biting wit and grace, Brass announces a fearless new voice with a timely, tender, and quintessentially American story.
Celeste Ng, author of Everything I Never Told You
Panoramic in scope yet intimate in detail, The Fortunes might be the most honest, unflinching, cathartically biting novel I've read about the Chinese American experience. It asks the big questions about identity and history that every American needs to ask in the 21st century.
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