An exciting new novel set in the "Chop Suey Circuit" of San Francisco right before World War II, from the beloved bestselling author of Snowflower and the Secret Fan and Shanghai Girls. In 1938, Ruby, Helen and Grace, three girls from very different backgrounds, find themselves competing at the same audition for showgirl roles at San Francisco's exclusive "Oriental" nightclub, the Forbidden City. Grace, an American-born Chinese girl has fled the Midwest and an abusive father. Helen is from a Chinese family who have deep roots in San Francisco's Chinatown. And, as both her friends know, Ruby is Japanese passing as Chinese. At times their differences are pronounced, but the girls grow to depend on one another in order to fulfill their individual dreams. Then, everything changes in a heartbeat with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Suddenly the government is sending innocent Japanese to internment camps under suspicion, and Ruby is one of them. But which of her friends betrayed her?
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Read this book for a book club, and I think that the primary reason this book was chosen was because the library had already arranged a Skype chat with Lisa See. There wasn't a whole lot of discussion after the call ended.
For me, this was too much of a literary fiction/character study to be very appealing. The three girls were well drawn, I believe they were well thought-out and distinct from each other (I didn't have the problem some readers had of not being able to tell the points of view apart). However, I pretty much never understood why they were friends. In the beginning it was a matter of convenience and I do think there was some bonding over teaching Helen to dance and getting an apartment together. But then Ruby is screwing around with the guy she KNOWS Grace likes and this is a totally horrible thing for her to do to her roommate and best friend! And then when Grace finds out, she just up and leaves to LA for like a year without any contact with Helen or Ruby.
There are multiple points in the decade this books spans where the friendship is present but that to me it didn't make any sense why they still considered each other best friends! Also, each girl's actions and spoken words almost never matched what they were thinking, so I don't understand how the friendship could have worked based on so many lies/omissions of information and also these fake interactions with each other.
I did like some aspects of the book: it's totally true that with a group of more than two people there is often one person "on the outs", so that was very well represented. Also, the time period and setting were interesting--I'm not sure I've ever read a WWII story where the fashion and fame aspects were discussed at all. Also, the history of the Asian/Oriental dance clubs and show circuits was pretty cool to read about, because that's another area of the US past that I didn't know about.
However, Ruby being sent to an internment camp was weird for me: it didn't seem to cause any changes to Ruby's character and we barely saw any of her time there. I'm not sure that there was much of a point of including the camp because Ruby was not different after she left, or really very different during her time there.
Overall, this book was a 2.5 stars for me: very middle of the road of my feelings. I probably could have liked it a bit more as an audiobook, and if it had been a bit shorter. If I'd not been reading it for a book club event, I probably would have put it down about a third of the way through.
I must say that I did quite enjoy the Skype chat with Lisa See. She was thoughtful and charming, and she had amusing anecdotes to hand about her writing process and about research for her books. She gave some thought to our questions and I believe answered them pretty well. No idea how much (if any) of what was said was stuff she's said before, but regardless I enjoyed the time we had with her.
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