Last year I read Sunbirds by Mirandi Riwoe and I loved it, so I was very excited when I saw that she had a new book coming out. Everything I have read from her so far has been historical, so it was a bit of a surprise when this book started in 2049.
Daniel is an elderly recluse who lives alone by choice. His life was shaped by a great tragedy which he is happy to have relegated to the past, but unfortunately, every now and again, other people want to reexamine those events. He spends his days making sculptures which he creates by breaking and reassembling different pieces of china, often those that have come down through his family over the years.
On the day of the big storm, Daniel's longan tree is destroyed. As he tries to clear the tree from the path, his neighbour Olivia Chong visits, and soon Daniel can't keep her away. She is very surprised to find that he has a Chinese altar inside his small house which he explains by saying that it was his dad's and that a few generations back there was a Chinese ancestor, who allegedly was a bushranger, who had a child with an Irish woman.
From Daniel's story, we move back through the generations to his aunt Wendy who is battling dementia, to her aunt who had left Australia to try and be a movie star in Hollywood in the late 1940s. battling type casting. In each generation, some of the family members embrace their Chinese heritage, but others choose to focus on their Irishness.
Eventually we get back to the story of Maria and Ah Yang, the place where the story started. The novel has an interesting structure in that the further we get back in time, the less page time the characters get. This makes sense because even now if you are doing family ancestry research it is easier to find details about the most recent generations than it is earlier generations where it becomes like a puzzle to put all the clue together. I found myself thinking that this is reflected in the art that Daniel creates - a whole piece made up of the small fragments of the past.
I did find Daniel and Wendy's story moving, but the one that affected me the most was the story of Seamus and Annie from the early 1900s, which highlighted the unfairness of the white Australia policy that was in place and was developed to only bring in migrants from "acceptable" white countries. Anyone else was forced to undertake crazy tests to prove that they could enter the country. The story of what happened to Annie and Seamus made me mad and made me cry at the same time.
A Short History of Longans opens with a family tree, which I guess isn't all that unusual in a historical novel that focuses on one family through time. However, in this case the family tree is very important and I found myself referring to it several times as I was reading. Of course, there is also the other family tree, the longan which met its end right at the beginning of the novel, and features at various points in the historical story.
This is my third book by Mirandi Riwoe, and I have enjoyed them all. I am making it a goal to finish reading all her books over the coming few weeks. I have several coming from different libraries around the state. Let's hope they don't all arrive at the same time. I was also surprised to learn that before she started focussing on historical fiction, this author published a mystery series under the name M J Tjia. I have requested the first one of those too.
I am sharing this review with New Release Challenge hosted at The Chocolate Lady's Book Review Blog and the Historical Fiction Reading Challenge which I host here.
Rating 4.5/
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