by Han Suyin
In this novel, a beautiful young newspaper woman from Dallas goes to China in 1944 and meets a young doctor who is a Communist with whom she falls in love. What follows is an extremely romantic version of China since World War II. Unfortunately, Han Suyin, a doctor who wrote A Many-Splendored Thing and nine other books, is a truly awful writer. " 'Oh, I am homesick after my own kind,' " her heroine muses. "Homesickness haphazard in intensity. It gnawed at the fabric of her being, but was not yet a drenching need." There are 500 pages of that sort of prose. The type is incredibly small too. (Bantam, $15.95)
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