-
Access Our
Most Anticipated
Books of 2025!
Summary | Excerpt | Reviews | Beyond the book | Read-Alikes | Genres & Themes | Author Bio
Book Reviewed by:A dazzling debut novel following the lives of three groundbreaking women - Marlene Dietrich, Anna May Wong, and Leni Riefenstahl - cinema legends who lit up the twentieth century.
At a chance encounter at a Berlin soirée in 1928, the photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt captures three very different women together in one frame: up-and-coming German actress Marlene Dietrich, who would wend her way into Hollywood as one of its lasting icons; Anna May Wong, the world's first Chinese American star, playing for bit parts while dreaming of breaking away from her father's modest laundry; and Leni Riefenstahl, whose work as a director would first make her famous--then, infamous.
From this curious point of intersection, Delayed Rays of a Star lets loose the trajectories of these women's lives. From Weimar Berlin to LA's Chinatown, from a seaside resort in East Germany to a luxury apartment on the Champs-Élysées, the different settings they inhabit are as richly textured as the roles they play: siren, muse, predator, or lover, each one a carefully calibrated performance. And in the orbit of each star live secondary players--a Chinese immigrant housemaid, a German soldier on leave from North Africa, a pompous Hollywood director--whose voices and viewpoints reveal the legacy each woman left in her own time, as well as in ours.
Amanda Lee Koe's playful, wry prose guides the reader dexterously around murky questions of ego, persona, complicity, desire, and difference. Intimate and raw, Delayed Rays of a Star is a visceral depiction of womanhood--its particular hungers, its calculations, and its eventual betrayals--and announces a bold new literary voice.
Delayed Rays of a Star explores the facades people adopt for the survival of their private and public selves. It examines how surface impressions and imagery can be both dangerous and vital. The loose structure of the novel, which at times appears haphazard, may not be to some readers' tastes. But this wandering is part of its magic. Like the cinematic professionals she features, Koe seeks to create an immersive tone and style that speaks for itself, and she succeeds...continued
Full Review
(731 words)
This review is available to non-members for a limited time. For full access,
become a member today.
(Reviewed by Elisabeth Cook).
Anna May Wong was a Chinese-American film star who worked in the entertainment industry from the 1920s to the 1960s. As a person of color, she experienced limitations in the roles she was able to play throughout her career due to discrimination and typecasting. Many recognize her today as an overlooked icon.
Wong was born in 1905 to Chinese-American parents in Los Angeles. She began her career in Alla Nazimova's 1919 film The Red Lantern, where she played an extra. She would go on to snag the lead in the 1922 silent film The Toll of the Sea, an adaptation of Madame Butterfly that was the first general release film in two-color Technicolor.
Within the industry, Wong had to contend with numerous obstacles due to her Chinese heritage, ...
This "beyond the book" feature is available to non-members for a limited time. Join today for full access.
If you liked Delayed Rays of a Star, try these:
by Amor Towles
Published 2025
From the bestselling author of The Lincoln Highway, A Gentleman in Moscow, and Rules of Civility, a richly detailed and sharply drawn collection of stories, including a novella featuring one of his most beloved characters
by Selby Wynn Schwartz
Published 2024
An exhilarating debut from a radiant new voice, After Sappho reimagines the intertwined lives of feminists at the turn of the twentieth century.
Ben Metcalf, author of Against the Country
Delayed Rays of a Star is a big, globetrotting, time-traveling wonder of a novel that made me laugh and in a hundred other ways appreciate the playful brilliance of Amanda Lee Koe. This is literature to feast upon and share, and a bold new voice to celebrate.
