Word: dawn
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LIVING ROOM COUCH—At the dawn of summer freedom, I thought that fulfillment would come from an internship or a temp job and a few weekends at the beach. I had no idea that I would also spend the next three months destroying mythical monsters, cavorting with Greek gods and repeatedly saving the world from the schemes of a mad scientist...
...then late last week, bottles were being dropped from five floors above our kids’ rooms. Two of my campers—the same kids who had woken me up at the crack of dawn with electric guitars—came running from their rooms. I never knew how it would feel having kids run to me in the night, calling my name...
...novel begins with the acerbic Dawn Stone, a self-described British "features hack," who takes a magazine job in Hong Kong during the heady days of 1995. Dawn fits in perfectly in Hong Kong's money-mad atmosphere, and Lanchester cuts loose, describing her rapid transformation from wry observer to gleeful participant to seductee, a metamorphosis that culminates when Dawn quits to do P.R. work for her shady billionaire Hong Kong boss. Not that the change from British tabloid hack to media conglomerate shill represents a measurable step-down in ethics...
...Dawn is then banished until the final chapter, and the story is taken up by a second narrator, Tom Stewart, a British lad who makes the sea trip to Hong Kong in 1934 at age 21. It's here that the narrative slows. On the trip east he meets Sister Maria, a Chinese nun "not so much pretty as perfect." She somehow teaches him Cantonese in six weeks, they become friends and Tom launches his career as a hotelier in Hong Kong, where his Chinese gives him a double-edged insight into the divided colony. The years pass and Stewart...
...build Hong Kong over the past 50 years has been, in effect, an expat?from the Westerners with empty pockets and overflowing dreams to the mainland refugees who made the city their own. Each of the three narrators of Fragrant Harbour has vivid memories of first seeing Hong Kong. Dawn in her business-class Cathay Pacific seat, enduring the white-knuckle approach to Kai Tak Airport; Tom hanging from the rail of his steam liner, drinking in the "junks like overgrown children's toys"; Matthew, the refugee, who crawled into Hong Kong through weeds and barbed wire. Those first impressions...