A Hundred Suns by Karin Tanabe

A Hundred Suns by Karin Tanabe

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

April 7, 2020

NetGalley, Historical fiction, arc, ebook 

St Martin’s Press

400 pages

ISBN: 9781250231475

4/8/20-4/24/20

I received a complimentary digital copy of this arc book from the publisher and NetGalley in exchange for an unbiased review.

In September of 1933, Jessie and Victor Lesage move from France to live in the French Indochina to hopefully win favor with his successful Michelin family. There have been many riots and political upheaval at the rubber plant which is in desperate need of supervision in south Cochinchina.

Jessie was born the oldest of 7 children in a poor farm in Blacksburg, Virginia. Growing up in destitution with minimal parental support, Jessie felt obliged to “parent” her younger siblings. Her desperate situation urges her desire to see the world. She is empowered to attend a small teaching college where she lived in a Manhattan boarding house. Her primary focus was saving enough money to travel to Paris while providing support to her siblings in VA.

The story becomes more complicated as Jessie and Victor along with their young daughter, Lucie, settle into their new home in a new country. Because they are affluent, they are buffered from the atrocious living conditions of the native residents. Many of these local residents work under oppressive circumstances which drives their ambitions to overthrow the leaders with their communist agenda.

Much to Jessie’s awe and comfort, she is befriended immediately by Marcelle de Fabry and her husband Arnaud. Most of the men are busy traveling for work leaving the women to enjoy the luxuries afforded to them. It is during this time that Marcelle seems to quickly engage Jessie into her world of mischief and debauchery. As the story unfolds it draws the reader into the secrets and deceit which both women don’t want revealed.

“Three can keep a secret if two of them are dead.” - Benjamin Franklin

So, the whirl world affairs of the rich and poor are entwined in ways for which the reader could never be prepared. The novel speaks to the political environment as relevant to the extents people will go for redemption and change.




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