Green Island

March 7, 2016
Ryan (Water Ghosts) reshapes the immigrant tale in this precise and poetic work. The book garners depth from its ambitious desire to take onârather than sidestepâthe shifting political climate of its Taiwanese landscape. The unnamed narrator is born in 1947 at the start of a government-led massacre in Taipei, and she enters into a turbulent time of lies and violenceâone she seems incapable of escaping no matter how far she goes from her home. She settles years later in California. Though in her youth she questions the betrayal her father makes in order to protect his family, she finds herself confronting the same problem as an adult. The vigilant government seeks to silence all critique of the dictatorial regime; it threatens her safety and that of her children, leading to a loss that even her past cannot prepare her for. "How far back would my wishes have to go to erase all of it?" she thinks. First through the experiences of the narrator's birth family in Taiwan, and then through the gaze of the family she creates in Berkeley with her activist husband, Ryan grants readers a closer look at the deep connections between familial love and the inescapability of history, both personal and political. This is a significant work, full of carefully researched detail that results in a moving and indelible story. Agent Daniel Lazar, Writers House.

November 15, 2015
An epic political novel focusing on post-World War II dissidents in Taiwan and especially on its repressive government. The narrator, never named, is born in February 1947, at a time of political upheaval in Taiwan. Two weeks after her birth, Chinese nationalists under the helm of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek respond brutally to an uprising. Caught in the political chaos is Dr. Tsai, the narrator's mild-mannered father, who makes a brief speech in favor of democracy at a community meeting...and disappears. He's gone for a decade--imprisoned, interrogated, and broken. When he's finally released, he's scarcely recognizable and is unable to work as a physician, instead taking on a few menial jobs, overseeing the narrator's education, and spending a lot of time in his room. Ryan skips over great chunks of time to keep the focus on Tsai's family, as the narrator lives her life within the context of political dissidence and the possible effects her father's incarceration might have on the family. For example, the narrator's brother is worried he won't get promoted in the army if it becomes known that his father was a political prisoner. The narrator eventually marries Wei, a Chinese-American, and moves to Berkeley, where her husband is a professor. They get into difficulty when they give refuge to Tang Jia Bao, a Taiwanese pro-democracy dissident who was smuggled out of the country, and this difficulty is exacerbated when the narrator and her husband visit Taiwan to see family. The narrative works movingly on many different levels but especially on the personal and the political.

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Starred review from January 1, 2016
In this engrossing epic, Ryan (Water Ghosts, 2009) lays bare five-and-a-half decades of Taiwanese history through one family's experience. The unnamed narrator is born in 1947, the youngest of four children of Dr. Tsai and his wife, Li Min, a painter. Not long after his daughter's birth, Dr. Tsai draws the ire of the Chinese Nationalists who control the island and is dragged off to prison. Narrowly escaping execution, he is sentenced to 10 years on Green Island, a prison colony. When he returns, his youngest daughter finds him to be both exacting and enigmatic, haunted by his time in prison as well as continuing government surveillance. At 24, the narrator leaves Taiwan to join her new husband, Wei, in Berkeley, California, where he is a professor. But when she and her husband take in a critic of the Taiwanese government who has fled the country, she finds that even in America she and her family are not safe from the fascist government ruling their homeland. Absorbing and affecting, this powerful tale explores the bond between a father and daughter, the compromises they are forced to make, and the prices they pay in their quest for freedom.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)