A Cup of Light, by Nicole Mones
May. 25th, 2006 04:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
annathepiperThis was the book that ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
jessicac had recommended to me a while back, and which I've finally gotten around to knocking off the To Read queue. Picoreview: Not bad at all, in an understated and subtle kind of way. My earlier remarks re: spare and lyrical prose, akin to a good green tea, hold up for the book as a whole.
I'm not entirely sure how I would classify this book. I found it in general fiction, which I suppose is the best thing to call it--there are myriad elements here, romance, suspense, mystery, Chinese history, the flavor of the modern-day political climate, and the Chinese porcelain smuggling trade. All of them blend together in such a way that one does not really feel dominant over another for me, which is what keeps me from pigeonholing this as a romance novel despite the fact that a love story is one of the most significant threads of the plot.
I say one of the most--not the most--because the main point of the story was not the blossoming relationship between our heroine Lia and her love interest Michael. Rather, it was the collection of valuable porcelain she is called to China to evaluate, and her attempts to determine where this huge and hitherto unknown collection of valuables has come from. There are plenty of intimations that the collection has a shadowy history, and certainly the glimpses into the workings of the porcelain smuggling trade add in some suspense... but that really isn't the main point of the story either. In a suspense novel you might expect that our heroine would be put into danger for what she is learning, but at no point in this plot is Lia ever in any sort of danger or even a hint of danger. The shadowy aspects of what's going on swirl around her and her investigations, but they never actually intrude upon her private, reclusive world.
And that was really kind of okay. I found Lia an interesting character, and I really liked reading about how the silence of her deafness was a refuge for her, not a prison--and how taking out her hearing aids was a private and personal act for her. Most of all I liked that she was refreshingly free of angst for the most part. She had her share of background foibles, tense history with both of her parents and an ill-fated near-marriage with a man who had been using her only for her access to fine porcelain objects... but the Lia we see in the novel seems pretty comfortable with herself and the current state of her life.
I think perhaps the one thing I didn't buy about Lia was the device of her retreating into her memory palace to pull up data on the pots. The flashbacks to the bits of history she was trying to remember were, I must admit, pretty interesting. But since they were presented as vivid, actual scenes rather than just data she had, it came across as if Lia had somehow witnessed all these things rather than just having read about them, and the details of these things seemed way, way too complex for things she might simply have researched. So it came across a bit as "Lia's remembering all this stuff by magic". It never got terribly annoying to me, but it was nevertheless there.
Enter Michael (surnamed Doyle, which couldn't help but make me partial to him even if he bore no resemblance whatsoever to my favorite bouzouki player). Now, I saw some people on the reviews for this book on Amazon making faces about a deaf woman and a cancer survivor being thrown together as love interests--and I can see where people might think that might be just too damned much angst thrown into one relationship. But as with Lia, so with Michael; although he has a lot of angst in his past, it only colors his present with nuances as opposed to dominating it. At no point do he and Lia ever come across to me as walking wounded; rather, these are people who have successfully handled their trials and tribulations, and who now have had the good fortune to find each other.
Plus, I thought they were rather charming together, and I easily bought what they saw in one another. ^_^
Meanwhile, we had some interesting side characters involved with the shadier aspects of the collection of pots. The ah chan Bai, the tycoon Gao Yideng, and others. All of them were deftly sketched in ways that made none of them come across as just "good" or "evil"; they felt like people to me, all with their own nuanced histories coloring their present day existences, as Lia's and Michael's colored theirs. I particularly liked the potter Lia goes to visit, and her discovery that the "Master of the Ruffled Feather" is in fact a young girl.
Plot-wise over all, I didn't find any real surprises here. There was no doubt that Michael and Lia would be together at the end (and I really did like the final phrases with that, I might add), and I never had any real doubt that Lia would successfully go through the whole collection and evaluate it, and that the sale would proceed as expected. I was vaguely disappointed that she never had any real challenges to overcome--for example, finding fakes in the collection never got her in any trouble, nor did we have any sign of her missing objects that actually were fakes. I thought for sure as well that Bai's attempt to switch in his own fake chicken cup would get her in trouble--but then, I was also kind of pleased that it didn't, and amused that the cup he thought was real was in fact another fake.
So all in all I was pleased to read this if nothing else for the various characters and the beauty of the prose. It's not a big flashy story by any stretch of the imagination, but then again, sometimes it's good to be subtle.
jessicac had recommended to me a while back, and which I've finally gotten around to knocking off the To Read queue. Picoreview: Not bad at all, in an understated and subtle kind of way. My earlier remarks re: spare and lyrical prose, akin to a good green tea, hold up for the book as a whole.I'm not entirely sure how I would classify this book. I found it in general fiction, which I suppose is the best thing to call it--there are myriad elements here, romance, suspense, mystery, Chinese history, the flavor of the modern-day political climate, and the Chinese porcelain smuggling trade. All of them blend together in such a way that one does not really feel dominant over another for me, which is what keeps me from pigeonholing this as a romance novel despite the fact that a love story is one of the most significant threads of the plot.
I say one of the most--not the most--because the main point of the story was not the blossoming relationship between our heroine Lia and her love interest Michael. Rather, it was the collection of valuable porcelain she is called to China to evaluate, and her attempts to determine where this huge and hitherto unknown collection of valuables has come from. There are plenty of intimations that the collection has a shadowy history, and certainly the glimpses into the workings of the porcelain smuggling trade add in some suspense... but that really isn't the main point of the story either. In a suspense novel you might expect that our heroine would be put into danger for what she is learning, but at no point in this plot is Lia ever in any sort of danger or even a hint of danger. The shadowy aspects of what's going on swirl around her and her investigations, but they never actually intrude upon her private, reclusive world.
And that was really kind of okay. I found Lia an interesting character, and I really liked reading about how the silence of her deafness was a refuge for her, not a prison--and how taking out her hearing aids was a private and personal act for her. Most of all I liked that she was refreshingly free of angst for the most part. She had her share of background foibles, tense history with both of her parents and an ill-fated near-marriage with a man who had been using her only for her access to fine porcelain objects... but the Lia we see in the novel seems pretty comfortable with herself and the current state of her life.
I think perhaps the one thing I didn't buy about Lia was the device of her retreating into her memory palace to pull up data on the pots. The flashbacks to the bits of history she was trying to remember were, I must admit, pretty interesting. But since they were presented as vivid, actual scenes rather than just data she had, it came across as if Lia had somehow witnessed all these things rather than just having read about them, and the details of these things seemed way, way too complex for things she might simply have researched. So it came across a bit as "Lia's remembering all this stuff by magic". It never got terribly annoying to me, but it was nevertheless there.
Enter Michael (surnamed Doyle, which couldn't help but make me partial to him even if he bore no resemblance whatsoever to my favorite bouzouki player). Now, I saw some people on the reviews for this book on Amazon making faces about a deaf woman and a cancer survivor being thrown together as love interests--and I can see where people might think that might be just too damned much angst thrown into one relationship. But as with Lia, so with Michael; although he has a lot of angst in his past, it only colors his present with nuances as opposed to dominating it. At no point do he and Lia ever come across to me as walking wounded; rather, these are people who have successfully handled their trials and tribulations, and who now have had the good fortune to find each other.
Plus, I thought they were rather charming together, and I easily bought what they saw in one another. ^_^
Meanwhile, we had some interesting side characters involved with the shadier aspects of the collection of pots. The ah chan Bai, the tycoon Gao Yideng, and others. All of them were deftly sketched in ways that made none of them come across as just "good" or "evil"; they felt like people to me, all with their own nuanced histories coloring their present day existences, as Lia's and Michael's colored theirs. I particularly liked the potter Lia goes to visit, and her discovery that the "Master of the Ruffled Feather" is in fact a young girl.
Plot-wise over all, I didn't find any real surprises here. There was no doubt that Michael and Lia would be together at the end (and I really did like the final phrases with that, I might add), and I never had any real doubt that Lia would successfully go through the whole collection and evaluate it, and that the sale would proceed as expected. I was vaguely disappointed that she never had any real challenges to overcome--for example, finding fakes in the collection never got her in any trouble, nor did we have any sign of her missing objects that actually were fakes. I thought for sure as well that Bai's attempt to switch in his own fake chicken cup would get her in trouble--but then, I was also kind of pleased that it didn't, and amused that the cup he thought was real was in fact another fake.
So all in all I was pleased to read this if nothing else for the various characters and the beauty of the prose. It's not a big flashy story by any stretch of the imagination, but then again, sometimes it's good to be subtle.