The Piano Teacher

Starred review from September 8, 2008
Former Elle
editor Lee delivers a standout debut dealing with the rigors of love and survival during a time of war, and the consequences of choices made under duress. Claire Pendleton, newly married and arrived in Hong Kong in 1952, finds work giving piano lessons to the daughter of Melody and Victor Chen, a wealthy Chinese couple. While the girl is less than interested in music, the Chens' flinty British expat driver, Will Truesdale, is certainly interested in Claire, and vice versa. Their fast-blossoming affair is juxtaposed against a plot line beginning in 1941 when Will gets swept up by the beautiful and tempestuous Trudy Liang, and then follows through his life during the Japanese occupation. As Claire and Will's affair becomes common knowledge, so do the specifics of Will's murky past, Trudy's motivations and Victor's role in past events. The rippling of past actions through to the present lends the narrative layers of intrigue and more than a few unexpected twists. Lee covers a little-known time in Chinese history without melodrama, and deconstructs without judgment the choices people make in order to live one more day under torturous circumstances.

Starred review from October 1, 2008
In 1952 Hong Kong, Claire Pendleton, newly married to a bland postwar British government official, lucks into a job as piano teacher to the untalented young daughter of the powerful and wealthy Victor and Melody Chen. It's not long before she enters into a passionate, albeit emotionally thwarted affair with the Chens' driver, Will Truesdale. Lee then takes her readers back to 1941 Hong Kong, where Will's fiery love affair with the mysterious, fearless, provocative Trudy Liang (her mother was Portuguese, her father from Shanghai) dominates the run-up to disaster. In her fiction debut, Lee uses the snobbish insulation of British high society in Hong Kong to show the unraveling of a way of life that implodes with the invasion of the Japanese during World War II. Thrust from privilege into imprisonment virtually overnight, Lee's characters are caught up in the intrigue and collusion that were part of wartime survival. Her adept pacing slowly exposes the inevitability of tragedy that engulfs her characters. Highly recommended.Beth E. Andersen, Ann Arbor Dist. Lib., MI

Copyright 2008 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

December 1, 2008
It is 1952 and the British government has just transferred newly married Martin Pendleton to Hong Kong with his young, naive bride, Claire. Looking to keep herself busy while her husband is working, Claire takes a job as a piano teacher to Locket Chen, the daughter of an upperclass Chinese family. Bored by her husband and surprised by her own desire for something exciting, Claire is lured by the colonys exotic ways and lavish lifestyle. She begins an affair with the mysterious Will Truesdale, the Chens chauffer, whose tragic past is marked by war, betrayal, and a deep, passionate relationship with a beautiful, Eurasian socialite, Trudy Liang. When Wills past collides with Claires present, Claire can only watch, stunned, as her delicately orchestrated life falls apart. Lees debut novel shifts back and forth between Claires story in 1952 and Wills past in 1942s war-torn Hong Kong. Lee has created the sort of interesting, complex characters, especially in Trudy, that drive a rich and intimate look at what happens to people under extraordinary circumstances.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2008, American Library Association.)

March 2, 2009
Orlagh Cassidy narrates this tale of Hong Kong’s ultra-wealthy Chinese and the British and American expats who share their high life until Japanese occupation in the early 1940s. After the war Claire, the American naïf who joins society through her role as a piano teacher, leaves her husband, is abandoned by her lover and settles into a quiet suburb far from the social whirl. Cassidy handles various accents expertly and has a keen sense of irony, but she is unsuited for more emotionally charged settings—the love scenes hardly seem romantic, and the horror, intrigue and collusion of the occupation period should have been recounted with more drama and less aloofness. A Viking hardcover (Reviews, Sept. 8).