Sunday, January 1, 2023

Cocoon by Zhang Yueran



Childhood is complicated enough but friends Li Jiaqi and Cheng Gong’s lives are further muddied by the upheavals of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. “Maybe this was the truest representation of childhood. Walking through a fog made of secrets, stumbling along a path we couldn’t see, not knowing where we were going. Growing up felt like making it through the fog and seeing the world clearly–but actually, that wasn’t the case. We’d just wrapped that fog around ourselves, each of us spinning it into a cocoon,” Gong says. The mildly confusing denouement doesn’t detract from the rawness of this memorable novel.

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