Orchid is picked from obscurity and lifted into the elite world of the Forbidden City as one of the Emperor's wives. She could influence a nation - but if she crosses the wrong people she could end up worse than dead.
My thoughts
Historical fiction is hard. You have to transport the reader to a different time with unfamiliar customs, and it's challenging to gracefully overcome the reader's culture shock. There's a dearth of good Asian historical fiction in English. I haaaated Shogun (the Westerner swoops in, sweeps up the girl, and saves the day with his brilliance? Blech.) I didn't care for Snow Flower and the Secret Fan (neither the writing nor the story wowed me). I did love Memoirs of a Geisha, but I was in college when I read it and I'm afraid to reread it just in case I got caught up in the love story and the book actually isn't that great.
Last year I read Anchee Min's devastating novel of the Cultural Revolution, Wild Ginger. And then I read Jung Chang's Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China, which was all the more devastating because it was true. Wild Ginger didn't have the most original story or the most compelling writing, but I was eager to read Empress Orchid. It's been on my shelf for years (it was a Richard & Judy book pick in 2006 when I was hanging around England watching things like Richard & Judy for a few months). And I hate to say it, but now that I've read it ... it failed to bring one of the most tragic periods of Chinese history to life for me, largely because it failed to translate life in the Forbidden City in a natural way, which may be an impossible task anyway.
The subject matter is thrilling. In the late nineteenth century, the Qing Dynasty was crumbling, threatened from the outside by powerful foreign adversaries and crippled on the inside by domestic infighting and corruption. A woman stepped up to take the reins of leadership. She inspired fear and suspicion among her male contemporaries. Historians placed the blame for the eventual fall of the dynasty on her shoulders. She must have been a remarkable woman. Who else could have seized power and held it for four decades? But the novel brought me no closer to understanding who she was or how she did it.
Bottom line
This is a prequel to the real drama and tragedy in Orchid's life, but I don't feel the need to pick up the next book.
Fine print
Empress Orchid, by Anchee Min
Genre: historical fiction
Photo from Goodreads
I bought this book
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