Rate this book

The Moonlight Palace (2014)

by Liz Rosenberg(Favorite Author)

3.45 of 5 Votes: 1

languge

English

genre

Romance

publisher

Lake Union Publishing

review 1: I DNF'd at about 40%. Minor spoilers ahead.This review is written from the viewpoint of a Malay Malaysian with Chinese, Indian and Arabic ancestry, with a fair amount of knowledge on the history of the region.So first, the novel is set in pre-independence Singapore, when the island was still occupied by the British and political power of the various Sultanates were waning. It tells the story of the teenaged descendant of the not-quite-deposed Sultan of Johore who ended up settling in Singapore.I am totally cool with that. But then we ended up with some sort of racial hodge-podge which I cannot seem to get my head around. The protagonist's name is Agnes Hussein. As in first name, last name. Why does she have such an anglicized name? Because her grandfather's British, of cou... morerse. Who somehow ended up marrying minor royalty.. Eh wait, no, her grandmother's a Nyonya Chinese, affectionately called Nei-Nei. Maybe it was the maternal side of the family? She lives with a great-uncle who is an Indian Muslim who married the grandmother's sister(?!). I think I got something wrong somewhere. I need a family tree.Anyway, Agnes Hussein. Hussein is not a last name. Malays (I am assuming she can be considered Malay as she is the last descendant of the royal line and all that) do not have last names. And she is supposed to be Muslim? That's just weird. But then, she does have a British grandfather, amirite? She's not a Tan or a Lee or a Patel. There must have been so much family drama underneath all that.Aaaaanywayyy, she lives in rundown Kampong Glam Palace which is also a place that provides accomodation for a few boarders. We have a Chinese student studying medicine (I assume in Universiti Malaya as it was known then), an Indian, and a....Muslim? Is this Muslim supposed to be Malay? I have no idea. Although I suppose he is because he was deported to the Malay Kingdom at some point of the story. By the way, there is no 'Malay Kingdom'. There is, however, a number of different Sultanates located on the Peninsula, collectively called The Malayan States.And the reason why the Muslim was deported just smacks of lazy writing homestly. This was set in a time when there was rising nationalism, and you HAD to make him into some sort of militant terrorist. Really.I had so many problems with the potrayal of characters in the book, and thought to myself, am I being too harsh? So I gave a quick summary to my brother and he was all "Das ridiculous. Why are you reading that again?"And so I rage-quit. DNF. So long, farewell.-------------I'm always up to reading fiction set in my part of the world, but I can't help but have a whole lot of doubt as to how believable the author is able to convey the culture. A heroine named Agnes? Hmm.. Okay, there are people who have Western names (I'm one of them) and the sultanate generally can get away with anything, name-wise. But then I read the reviews. The names! The names! They just don't fit! Chachi? Sounds Indian. Nei-Nei? Acceptable to a certain level, I guess.I'll give this book a go, probably will end up as a hate-read. Sorry.
review 2: The Moonlight Palace, by Liz Rosenberg"Let's agree right here at the outset that memory is made up of one part perception, one part intuition, and one part true invention." So begins Agnes Hussein, the unreliable narrator of The Moonlight Palace. The last descendant of the last sultan of Singapore, she is a curious teenage girl in early 20th century Singapore. Her family, once rich and important, still lives in the palace that once ruled Singapore but is now a crumbling ruin. Getting by on rent from boarders and her grandfather's military pension, the family is all but watching the clock run out. Agnes, the youngest member, has to find her way in a new world, one which is delightfully brought to life in the book. Singapore in the 1920s was a crossroads of worlds (European colonialists, Asian natives, Muslim immigrants) and times (the past and modernity), and the changes are integrated into the plot seamlessly. (My last fictional view into Singapore was a little more blatant about describing the setting.) Agnes's family finds herself at the center of the crossroads, as the power struggles to shape the future of Singapore play themselves out over the ownership of her family home. The larger ideas of what a country is ("For true progress to be made, a generation must be sacrificed.") are reflected in the battle over the sultan's palace.In this time of change, Agnes is looking at the world as an adult for the first time. She gets her first job (from a Jew!) and develops her first crush (on an Englishman!), while her family's boarders (a Chinese student and a devout Muslim) make news, too. Agnes has to grow up in the process of dealing with her family's last throes of relevance in a rapidly changing world, and it's that world that makes you care about the story. I can't say enough about how interwoven the setting is with the story; after reading a chapter just to see what happens you realize you got to see a whole new world without having it take you out of the story. It's probably the most difficult accomplishment of historical fiction, and it's done here to near perfection.The prose is efficient and not spectacular, though it contains a few gems:"We were still in the honeymoon phase, when you don't tell the other person everything you are thinking.""People fight ferociously to keep their dreams intact. ... Nations...flags...religions..."The real accomplishment here was creating a universe and reflecting it in a microcosm of a story. Recommended. less

Download links for: The Moonlight Palace

Advertising