I really enjoyed the first part of this story! Yunhong's experiences were fascinating, and I loved the detail included. However, I felt myself growing further from the characters as the tale progressed, and I became confused about what generation we were in and who was who and how they were connected. Overall, I loved the first half or so, but the second lost my interest. I'd have loved for it to focus on fewer characters, or to be drawn out a bit longer so I could connect better with the women in later generations!

I do not think I can put into words how much I loved this book, I was lucky to get the audio book and I was completely drawn into all these strong women characters - This is an amazing multigenerational story staring in 1917 and takes the reader through 100 years of family history and heartache, but the heartache and sadness is easily overcome by seeing how strong all the women in this book are and the sacrifices they all made not for themselves but for their families-
Wendy Chen has weaved together a beautiful story that is very vivid and heartfelt and this book should not be passed over-

Thank you to NetGalley, Algonquin Books and Hachette Audio for the advanced copy of this book in exchange for an honest review!

The book started off strong and really made me care about our main character in Part I, Yunhong. As someone lacking much knowledge of the Cultural Revolution in China prior to reading this novel, I think I learned a lot and really feel for what many families had to go through during this time. I found myself confused during parts of this novel because it moves quickly and lacks context in some areas, but that's on me to further educate myself on the subject.

This is a short novel, but it definitely had many elements I enjoyed. There were a lot of good comments on the agency women deserve to choose their own destinies and the difficult decisions they are confronted with. I also found the discussion of generational trauma to be very intriguing and wish it was a topic we spent more time focusing on.

For a multi-generational story, the book felt disjointed, with certain parts gripping me while others dragged. Part of the reason for this was the sheer number of characters in the novel, who were inevitably hard to keep track of and therefore, made it difficult to choose any one character to really root for. I found our main women likable for the most part, but never felt I really knew enough about them to form much of an attachment. I think there are great themes touched on in this book, but because of its shorter length, they only dip a bit below surface level.

I read this book via audio and really enjoyed the narrator. I enjoyed the variety of voices used and found it helped pull me into the story even more! My only problem with the audio version was that I found it very difficult to keep up with the amount of the character names covered in such a small amount of time. I think it would enhance the experience to include a reference guide or family tree along with the audio version of this book.

Their Divine Fires by Wendy Chen Narrated by Katharine Chin is more than just a novel, it is a lyrical opus of a families story spanning a century. More than this, it is a family that is symbolic of the human face of enduring through incredibly tumultuous and under-reported times in history. The human face of the people of China

This audiobook was breathtaking to the extent that the book is immediately on my keeper list (I will also quantify this by my own mother having a similar story so this resonated with me on so many levels)

Katharine Chin is a phenomenal narrator and is well suited to the elegant lyricism of the narrative even when the storyline went to more dark and tense places. Beautifully done

I am astounded that this is a debut novel. Gobsmacked. Wendy Chen brings together family history and weaves it with folklore and the history of 20th century China, travelling from the story of her great grandmother to the dichotomy between two cousins in 2018, one in Boston, one still in China

Heart-rending and awe-inspiring, Chen draws the reader into a time long gone, to the fear and bravery of the people through the end days of feudalism, the Cultural Revolution, occupation by the Japanese and the uprising and terror of the 1980's and unrest of the 90s (I remember so well the news reports and the sadly poignant imagery of the time)

This is a novel that arfully draws together the trifecta of family history, historical events and folklore and weaves together an epic page-turner

Absolutely astounding

Thank you to Netgalley, Hachette Audio | Algonquin Books, the author Wendy Chen and narrator Katharine Chin for this stunning ALC. My review is left voluntarily and all opinions are my own

Many thanks to NetGalley and Hachette Audio for the opportunity to listen to an ARC of this audiobook.

Wendy Chen is an award-winning poet, writer and editor. This debut novel is inspired by her own family’s history in China and in the United States. In a three-part chronological narrative, she relates a story shaped by Chinese history and culture, folklore and politics. Beginning in rural southern China in 1917, as revolution and world war flare, and culminating in the United States, she follows the sometimes overlapping and always interconnected generations of one family, its marriages, births, deaths and everyday struggles, in a century of great change and upheaval. The China of the first generation has disappeared by the story’s conclusion. The family is American, but, even for the American-born Emily, the heart-ties cannot be easily forgotten.

The first third focuses on the family of a respected rural physician, his older and younger sons, and his middle daughter, the headstrong Yunhong. It follows the family’s fate, and especially that of its women, through the revolution with its hope for a better world and its disintegration into rival camps, clashing ideologies, and bloody conflict. The eldest son is a diehard Communist, the younger less so, but both take part in destroying the wealthy noble family that Yunhong marries into. At their hands, the happiest day of her life becomes the worst, presaging what is to come for her, her family, and China.

Suddenly a pregnant young widow, she is left to raise her child under a pretext that saves her family’s honour but poisons her relationship with her daughter, Yuexin, and plants the seeds for troubled relations across multiple generations. As China falls to Japan, and with her brothers gone, she saves her parents and child, who knows her only as a cousin and never knows her father. When they escape their village, Yunhong reveals her true identity to the then 9 year old Yuexin, who never forgives her.

The great-grandparents and Yunhong fade into the background rather abruptly in the second part, as the story’s refocuses on Yuexin’s twin daughters, Hongxing and Yonghong. Marked by their mother’s unwillingness to come to terms with her tragic history, and their parents’ troubled marriage, the girls come of age during Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Despite being twins, they are not close; their mother openly favours the pretty, talented, charming Hongxing over her subdued, serious, clumsy sister. They take very different paths. Clever and ambitious, Hongxing does all the right things and becomes a celebrated dancer and actress. Yonghong, studious and questioning, is unmoored by the death of her childhood love, who was “sent down” to the countryside to work alongside many others until their bodies gave out. With only dark visions of the future, she leaves for the United States, where she meets and marries another Chinese ex-pat in college.

As the third part opens, Hongxing is a celebrity, wealthy, adored by the masses and the government, and secretly in love with a female fellow dancer. She is firmly attached to China, which has allowed her to have everything she dreamed of as a child. By contrast, with only dark visions of the future, Yonhong leaves for the United States, where she meets and marries another Chinese ex-pat in college. When she is expecting their first and only child, her mother arrives to take care of them.

Although China runs through their post-immigration lives, the novel’s closing section is largely Emily’s story. Raised mostly by her grandmother, Emily grows up with strict and distant parents who seem to be burying the stories that she needs to know in order to feel connected to them and their culture. Her aunt and other kin visit occasionally, and briefly, hints are dropped, allusions are made. But no questions are answered, no information about their previous lives is offered. Then a number of precipitous events slowly crack open the sealed past. As a young adult, Emily is begins to fill out her own identity with the missing pieces of theirs.

This is a beautifully written, very moving story, steeped in the vivid and often terrible twentieth century history of China. It also speaks sensitively to the immigrant experience, especially in view of what was being left behind—nightmares, yes, but also familial and cultural roots. Her evocation of the way in which people experienced the Cultural Revolution and its aftermath is breathtaking in what it reveals of the gap between noble ideals and what really happened. The “in between” status of first generation children of immigrants is also very realistically rendered. I only wish that the novel could have been longer, at least in the middle section, which seems to lop off the opening part rather than transitioning. Although all three sections are about the children and young people born into that time and place, the author makes their family history integral, as it has to be, to their growing up. She especially succeeds in showing how the wider history touches ordinary lives irrevocably, and she does so very effectively. Also impressive is the clear and emotive narration by Katherine Chin. I came away with an understanding that nation and family, love and loyalty, have intricately bound meanings.