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    White Horse
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    White Horse
    Unavailable
    White Horse
    Ebook67 pages43 minutes

    White Horse

    By Yan Ge and Nicky Harman

    4.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    This compact novella contains a gripping psychological tale, enlivened by wickedly sharp insights into contemporary small-town life in China.

    Yun Yun lives in a small West China town with her widowed father and an uncle, aunt, and older cousin who live nearby. One day, her once-secure world begins to fall apart. Through her eyes, we observe her cousin, Zhang Qing, keen to dive into the excitements of adolescence, but clashing with repressive parents. Ensuing tensions reveal that the relationships between the two families are founded on a terrible lie.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHopeRoad
    Release dateApr 25, 2019
    ISBN9781916467132
    Unavailable
    White Horse
    Author

    Yan Ge

    Yan Ge was born in Sichuan, China. She is a fiction writer in both Chinese and English, and is the author of thirteen books in Chinese, including five novels. The first of her Chinese-language novels to be translated and released in the US, Strange Beasts of China, was one of The New York Times Notable Books of the Year. Yan’s English writing has appeared in The New York Times, the Irish Times, TLS, the Stinging Fly, and more. She has an MFA in creative writing from the University of East Anglia where she was the recipient of the UEA International Award for 2018–2019. She lives in Norwich with her husband and son.

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    Reviews for White Horse

    4.5/5

    4 ratings1 review

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    • 4/5
      A brief young adult novella, translated from the Chinese, Yan Ge's White Horse chronicles a few years in the life of Yun Yun, a young girl whose family life begins to deteriorate, as she and her cousin Zhang Qing grow older. Episodic in nature, the narrative here skips from scene to scene, depicting key moments of change, from the ways in which Zhang Qing begins to draw away from Yun Yun, and to rebel, as she reaches adolescence, to the slowly building revelation that Yun Yun's widowed father and Zhang Qing's married mother have a more complicated relationship than either girl realized. It is at these key moments that Yun Yun sees a mysterious white horse, whose function - a harbinger of those changes? a talisman protecting Yun Yun against the worst harm those changes can bring? - is not always clear. The story ends as Yun Yun graduates from primary school at the top of her class, her family life terribly compromised...At a brief eighty-four pages, White Horse is a quick read, and I finished it the other day during the course of a single train commute home. Mulling it over ever since, I've come to the conclusion that I don't entirely understand it, although I did find it engrossing and at times quite poignant. I'm not sure that I grasped the significance of the white horse in the story, although I learn toward the interpretation that it offered both warning and protection, as Yun Yun did seem to retain quite a bit of her innocence (or perhaps just distance?), despite the sordid events occurring around her. Of course, I also wondered whether the horse was related to her father, since one of his chess moves, at the beginning of the story, involved "white horse bright hooves." I found some of the revelations toward the close of the book somewhat confusing as well. Apparently Yun Yun's father and Zhang Qing's mother had been pretending to be siblings, for the benefit of Zhang Qing's father, even though the whole town knew otherwise, and had previously had a romantic relationship. I wasn't sure if the implication of this was that Zhang Qing was Yun Yun's sister, or what to make of the identity of Yun Yun's mother. Her statement to her classmate, at the close of the book, that she was the child of a white horse, just added more confusion.This was definitely worth reading, if for nothing else than the Chinese take on the classic theme of growing up, but I think it is also worth reading for the storytelling, despite the confusion I felt. Some of the scenes - especially the ones in which Auntie is being abusive to Zhang Qing - are very well done, and really made me cringe in sympathy. Recommended to anyone looking for coming of age stories, or for young adult novels set in China.