Little Gods, Meng Jin
Little Gods, Meng Jin
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Little Gods
A Novel

Author: Meng Jin

Narrator: Karen Huie, Francois Chau, Emily Woo Zeller

Unabridged: 9 hr 31 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: HarperAudio

Published: 01/14/2020


Synopsis

“Expands the future of the immigrant novel.” – Gish Jen, New York Times Book Review
“Spectacular and emotionally polyphonic…That Jin has managed to craft such an intimate, emotionally complex story is an awesome achievement. That she managed to do it in her debut novel, doubly so.” – Omar El Akkad, BookPage (starred review) On the night of June Fourth, a woman gives birth in a Beijing hospital alone. Thus begins the unraveling of Su Lan, a brilliant physicist who until this moment has successfully erased her past, fighting what she calls the mind’s arrow of time. Seventeen years later, Su Lan’s daughter, Liya, brings her mother’s ashes to China, along with the silences and contradictions of Su Lan’s life. In a territory inhabited by the ghosts of the living and the dead, Liya’s memories are joined by those of two others: Zhu Wen, the woman last to know Su Lan before she left China, and Yongzong, the father Liya has never known. In this way a portrait of Su Lan emerges: an ambitious scientist, an ambivalent mother, and a woman whose relationship to her own history shapes and ultimately unmakes Liya’s own sense of displacement. A story of migrations literal and emotional, spanning time, space and class, Little Gods is a sharp yet expansive exploration of the aftermath of unfulfilled dreams, an immigrant story in negative that grapples with our tenuous connections to memory, history, and self.

About Meng Jin

Meng Jin was born in Shanghai and lives in San Francisco. A Kundiman Fellow, she is a graduate of Harvard and Hunter College. Little Gods is her first novel.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Roxane on August 14, 2020

Really strong idea. Strong writing. Interesting structure. At times I struggled to hold everything together. Wanted less narrative distance. But still this is an excellent novel. Well worth your time.......more

Goodreads review by Bkwmlee on January 26, 2020

As I sit down to write this review, I’m struggling a bit because I’m trying to figure out what my feelings are toward this book. Normally, when I read a book, I will either gravitate towards one side or another in terms of liking the book or not liking it – interestingly enough, this is actually one......more

Goodreads review by Barbara on March 06, 2020

Reading Meng Jin’s “Little Gods” was like trying to remember and to note a dream. The whole novel felt dream-like to me, changing in time and place. “Little Gods” is a story of an impoverished young Chinese girl who breaks out of her destitution by scoring well on a national exam. Because of her sco......more

Goodreads review by Briana on February 01, 2020

I enjoyed the heck out of this novel, Little Gods by Meng Jin. This was one of my most anticipated reads of 2020 and I wasn’t disappointed. I’m a little upset that the initial reactions on Goodreads are mixed but it seems to be raving in most literary circles which is good—I hope that doesn’t seem p......more

Goodreads review by JimZ on March 06, 2020

Overall I liked this book a lot. This is Meng Jin’s debut novel, so I hope there is more of writing to come in the future. You can get a synopsis of the book from Goodreads…the one thing that I liked was her description of certain concepts of physics. The passage of time we normally think of as movin......more