All the Flowers in Shanghai

Jepson, a film producer and founding editor of Asia Literary Review, makes his fiction debut with a saga set in 1930s Shanghai. Heroine Xiao Feng must take her dead sister’s place in an arranged marriage to Xiong Fa, a son from the prosperous Sang family. After marrying, the mistreated, desperately unhappy Feng clings to memories from the days she spent in the garden with her grandfather and Bi, the seamstress’s son. Vowing not to bring a baby girl into the rigid, patriarchal world of the Sangs, Feng makes a life-altering decision after she bears her first child. When she realizes the power she wields in producing a male heir, she transforms herself into a wealthy, sophisticated, and ruthless First Wife. Unfortunately, the Japanese invasion of China weakens ancient social structures, and the world as the powerful Sang family has known it unravels. Despite the riveting story line, the novel suffers from awkward syntax, and its treatment of time (decades and wars are dismissed in single pages) hints at more familiarity with quickly moving screenplays than full-length fiction. (Jan.)