A
Literary Saloon
&
Site of Review.

Trying to meet all your book preview and review needs.

Contents:

Main

the Best

the Rest

Review Index

Links

to e-mail us:

the complete review - fiction

Wild Child

by
Chang Ta-chun

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

- Return to top of the page -

Our Assessment:

B : a harsher view of youth in modern Taiwan

See our review for fuller assessment.

  From the Reviews:

• "(A) more brutal depiction of the spiritual vacuum of Taiwanese youth." - The Economist
  
  
• "Brutal, pointedly anesthetizing, jaggedly written and willfully disorienting, this second novella is heavily and knowingly indebted to gangster movies and pop culture." - Maureen McLane, The New York Times Book Review

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

- Return to top of the page -

The complete review's Review:

       Wild Child presents a harsher version of modern Taiwanese life than its companion piece, My Kid Sister (see our review), does. Hou Shichun, the young teenager who narrates the novel, is a disaffected youth.
       "Everything began with the sudden disappearance of my father", he says. His father's announcement comes at a most inopportune time, and leads Hou Shichun to rebel against school and family life all in one go. Most of the novel then follows his adventures on the streets, becoming involved with an underworld of other youths, of gangs, and stumbling into petty organized crime.
       It is a fairly dark novel of Taiwan's underside, well related, with an odd cast of cast-off characters.

- Return to top of the page -

Links:

• Columbia University Press publicity page

• Emdashes
• Publishers Weekly
• Tirelessreader

• My Kid Sister
• See also: Wild Kids

• See Index of Chinese literature

- Return to top of the page -

About the Author:

       Taiwanese author Chang Ta-chun was born in 1957.

- Return to top of the page -

© 2000-2021 the complete review

Main | the New | the Best | the Rest | Review Index | Links