I was already interested A Hundred Suns by Karin Tanabe after reading her wonderful previous novel, The Gilded Years. In A Hundred Suns, American Jessie Holland Lasage moves to Vietnam, or French Indochina as it was then known, along with her French husband Victor Michelin Lasage and their adorable daughter Lucie. Victor is coming over to supervise the Michelin rubber plantations, because his clever wife spotted an opportunity for a Michelin cousin to prove himself in the distant colony, and return in a few years to a higher post in the inner circle back in France.

At least, that’s the idea. As the story progresses, and Jessie meets more of the expat circle, everyone seems to have complicated motives for moving abroad. At first, her new friend Marcelle seems like another bored expat wife, but she has a Vietnamese boyfriend and ties to communist rebels. Jessie’s husband may be mixed up in the Michelin family’s darker side, cruelly exploiting local workers.

Jessie has been pretty much the master of controlling her narrative through careful omission and stretches of the truth. She’s reinvented herself several times. Victor gives her a watch with an orange on it, because for him, the surname Holland means William of Orange, and not backwoods poverty like it does for Jessie. She is almost an unreliable narrator, since she’s keeping so many secrets, and having such strange memory lapses.

Each character here has their own complex motivations and goals. The author shows how each person is affected by their past experiences, and each person thinks they’re doing what must be done.  So it’s easy for readers to sympathize with more than one character, even when they’re in opposition to each other.

This is a compelling ensemble novel with a satisfying but realistic conclusion.

 

This is my Review of the Month for the review collection on LovelyAudiobooks.info