The Forbidden Purple City

Finalist, City of Vancouver Book Award 2019
A man returns to Hoi An in his retirement to compose a poem honouring his parents. Two teenagers, ostracized in a private school, forge an unlikely bond. A son discovers the truth about his father's business ventures and his dreams of success. A young bride, isolated on a remote island with her new husband, finds community in a group of abalone divers.

Taking the title for his debut collection of short fiction from the walled palace of Vietnam's Nguyen dynasty, Philip Huynh dives headfirst into the Vietnamese diaspora. In these beautifully crafted stories, crystalline in their clarity and immersive in their intensity, he creates a universe inhabited by the deprivations of war, the reinvention of self in a new and unfamiliar settings, and the tensions between old-world parents and new-world children. Rooted in history and tradition yet startlingly contemporary in their approach, Huynh's stories are sensuously evocative, plunging us into worlds so all-encompassing that we can smell the scent of orange blossoms and hear the rumble of bass lines from suburban car stereos.

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arielaonthego

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Saint John, New Brunswick

average rating is 5 out of 5

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The Forbidden Purple City

The Forbidden Purple City is a short story collection which follows the stories of many different Vietnamese characters. Most of the characters are Vietnamese living in Canada, mostly Vancouver, and I really liked how the two countries were connected through these short stories. Personally, I don’t really like to write short stories because I like being able to give my readers some sort of context to the story that I’m writing about, rather than write a little piece of what could be a bigger story, But short stories are like dreams, you only get a little bit of the story until it ends, or you wake up.

With dreams you don’t need context, you’re just immersed in your own mind. Short stories are the same, and while I might not like to write them, I sure love reading them. In this book, it reminded just why I love little snippets of stories so much. Vietnam is a country that I loved visiting, and getting to read about Vietnamese characters living in Canada, and the hardships that some might face living abroad was a really meaningful learning experience for me. I loved every single short story in this book, because each one was well-written and told from a perspective different from the last.

With short stories, everything is need-to-know only, you need to be able to fit as much as possible in your little story, and I really liked that there was no infodumping, or over explaining anything. It wasn’t until I started writing this review that we didn’t even get to know the main character’s name for most of the stories. One more thing before I end this review, everything was very vivid and it was very easy for me to picture what was happening. Maybe the fact that I’m been to Vietnam helped me to picture its streets and its landmarks, but everything was well described. Obviously I really liked the book, and while I’m sure children could appreciate it’s stories, I think its more suited for older audiences.

I recommend this book.