Canada Reads 2010 — The Jade Peony via Booberfish.com
The fourth book in my series for CBC Canada Reads is The Jade Peony, by Wayson Choy.
Let’s cut right to the chase: This was an okay book, but not a favourite by any means. Of the four books I’ve head, it’s sitting solidly in third place. Nikolski and Fall On Your Knees both had some resonance with me through their stories and memorable characters, while Generation X inspired an intense repulsion. The Jade Peony was just… meh.
The novel is told through the eyes of three children in the same family in the roughly 5 to 15 age range, living in Vancouver’s Chinatown in the 1930s and 1940s. On the face of it this could have had very similar results to Nikolski and Fall On Your Knees, which featured multiple points of view and stories that connected in different...