Flash House by Aimee Liu

Flash House is a mystery story set in the period 1949-1951, the time of the Chinese Communist revolution and the time of the McCarthy era in the United States. Some novels are simply entertaining stories, with no underlying moral, philosophical, or psychological theme. Brick Lane is a book about transitions in life, about human growth, about finding joy in life. Flash House is an entertaining story with no underlying theme; it could easily be imagined as a movie (although probably with a different ending). Flash House is well written, though Aimee Liu is not the writer that Monica Ali is. Written by a woman, the book was written from a feminine point of view, actually two feminine points of view. The book traces the lives of two principal characters – Kamla, a 10 year old girl who has been sold to the operator of a dirty, cheap house of prostitution in New Delhi, India, and Joanna Shaw, the wife of a newsman in New Delhi and a woman who runs a home that rescues young prostitutes and trains them for lives outside of prostitution. The novel switches back and forth between the voice of Kamla, who tells her story, and the voice of an unseen narrator, who tells the story of Joanna Shaw as well as other characters in the book. Kamla’s story is about her joyful rescue from the house of prostitution, her involvement with Joanna Shaw, her fear and eventual abandonment by Joanna Shaw, and her triumph in life after all of her ordeals. Joanna Shaw’s story is about the disappearance of her husband and her dogged tracking of him throughout China, helped by one of his friends, who turned out to be an Australian setting up a spy operation in Southeast Asia. The end of the book was unsatisfying for me, but it was positive and brought a feeling of completion to the story.