I've finally read The Long March Home by Zoe Roy and i have a lot to process over this moving novel. Taking place over three generations of strong women, all who set out on journeys to secure independence and freedom for themselves and their future family, just in different ways. While they experience different hardships, the commanality that they share between them (aside from blood) is their strong-willed, drive for answers in some way shape or form, that keep them going.

The Long March Home is a novel of hardship, the women experience sexism and racism in Canada, while also experiencing sexism, paranoia, danger, and violence in the ever changing, cultural revolution of China. Poverty and political discrimination, loss and tragedy, each women will learn that home is what you make it.

Zoe Roy writes this brilliantly and captures the essence of everything going on in such an enrapturing way. I highly recommend not only this book, but all of her other books as well. ( )

This novel "The Long Walk Home" written by Zoë S. Roy opens with the story of a woman born in America, then married to a Chinese, living in China, just before the Cultural Revolution, in 1965.

His tribulations moved me greatly, and alert us to the atrocities committed by Mao's paertians, his persecutions of "intellectuals", his repressive and dissuasive policy of denunciations, and his order given against Americans residing in China, called " the imperialists”, who had to leave North Korea.

It concerns the heroine, a young mother who has just given birth to the third, just when Mao forbids more than two children! She is denounced, suspected of spying in the pay of the Americans by the simple fact that she was born there.
Her husband, accused of having married her (!) is kidnapped and locked up in a labor camp!

The proletarian revolution, in 1967, generates a workers' elite which governs, from now on, the people leveled down, and denounces the intellectuals of which the professors belong, including heroin, but also all that is linked to learning cultural. Severely rectified, these "overly intelligent thinkers" are "broken", distant, locked up so as not to create a wave of revolt.

In this overwhelming context, she, an art teacher, is accused by the "Red Workers' Brigade" of bearing the Chinese name of her husband, and is sentenced to thirteen years in prison!
She will finally win her trial, freed after eight years, thanks to the intervention of the United States, and the death of Mao in 1976.
She will meet her third child, having never seen him!

Then opens the story of this one, this girl who has no mother, raised by her 57-year-old nanny, who experiences the death of her older brother, and who grows up to the radical turning point, when 'she is thirteen years old. His mother, released, his father returned, it is his maternal grandmother, who comes from the United States to know them. She recounts her childhood memories, her games and her friends, and decides to follow her grandmother when she returns home, to pursue long studies.

It is through the eyes of her child, that we live day by day, the evolution of this child who was deprived of her mother, and it is a duty of memory that she undertakes with her grandmother. , guardian of a family secret.

It is these children, born after this Chinese cultural revolution, who make the China of today, whose broken memory tries to heal the wounds of the past, so that oppression never returns.

A true, moving and educational book on a reality that we no longer talk about. I loved! Thank you for this story that will resonate for a long time in my heart. ( )

Note: I won a free eBook copy of this book in PDF format from LibraryThing's Member Giveaway.

After reading Roy's short story collection "Butterfly Tears," I was excited to read this novel. "The Long March Home" recounts China's Cultural Revolution largely from the experiences of a young girl named Yezi. As the novel progresses, Yezi grows up and begins to learn how the Cultural Revolution has impacted the history of her family as well as her own life experiences. Roy tells Yezi's story with a sense of realism that conveys the joys and challenges of growing up, while incorporating historical events to cast occasional shadows over the novel's tone. Shifts in perspective also reveal details involving the three important women in Yezi's life: her mother, the woman who raised her, and her grandmother. Readers are transported across time and place through the story of this transnational family. ( )

The book follows the female members of a family living in China during Chairman Mao’s Cultural Revolution. It is interesting to see how the regime’s policies affect their lives. But there is little action here. Rather, much of this quiet book revolves around domestic life, which can be very slow-going. And while I had empathy for the mother (Meihua), who is the focus of the early chapters, I failed to develop any interest in her young daughter, (Yezi), who dominates in the latter half of the book. For the final third, the story shifts and is set in America.
The author’s writing is nicely unaffected and simple, and it can be weirdly soothing at times. But overall, I found myself getting impatient with the book’s unnecessary fluff.
Thanks to the author for a free copy of the book in exchange for my honest review. ( )

I enjoyed the Chinese history in this book and the basic story. The edition I read (2009) had many typographical errors and definitely needed some proofreading. Otherwise a fine novel. ( )