Ophelia’s Great Aunt Violet sits down with her for a meal on the day of the 1977 handover ceremony transferring Hong Kong from British governance to China. Chronicling about a decade, from 1932 to ‘42ish, Violet recounts how two feuding families’ fates become entangled, as both houses struggle to find themselves with the fallout of the Japanese invasion and occupation.

Themes around colonization and tradition working together to remove Agency and put members of the family on self-destructive, completely avoidable paths—and the importance of equality, centering on the female characters—illustrate the complexity of harm done to a population by larger forces, solely driven by mad and wild ideals the men of both countries hold.

While not gratuitous, events that often happen in fiction intersecting wars like this do occur. Sexual assault and just heinous, horrible things happening on a macro and granular level. It starts off almost lighthearted, this feud between families; references of Romeo and Juliet are made. It’s really nothing compared to what comes in later years and the war breaks out, and what the women have to struggle through. So, buckle up for that aspect. Interestingly, the war time aspect intersects with Canadians in some ways I wouldn’t have expected either. I liked that a lot.

One thing that bothered me is always a personal gripe with stories like this: The storyteller, in this case Violet, is never diegetic when we are reading what she is ostensibly telling Ophelia, and that kind of stuff always bugs me. It digresses into third person granular abstractions with interjections from Violet in the first person. Not at all how someone actually telling the story would sound like or describe things, until the interjections. And even then it’s dicey, really. Why not just make the whole thing third person then? Always needles me.