Catherine Raynes: The Correspondent and Daughters of the Sun and Moon

The Correspondent by Virginia Evans  

In her letters to family and friends we come to know the life of Sybil Van Antwerp: stubborn, cantankerous, opinionated, always steadfast in her belief in the power of the written word. 

But as the clock begins to tick for Sybil, the need for a few post-scripts to the life she’s led becomes apparent. Fixing her difficult relationship with her children. Taking a final chance at romance. Atoning for an old legal case which has come back to haunt her. And finally, reckoning with a devastating loss that she has spent the last thirty years holding close to her chest. 

Daughters of the Sun and Moon by Lisa See  

In 1870, three Chinese women arrive in the small, dusty, and violent pueblo of Los Angeles. Dove, the bound-footed daughter of an imperial scholar, is entrancing and innocent, poised to fulfill her role as a daughter with an arranged marriage to a much older merchant. Petal, the big-footed daughter of peasants, is arriving on the shores of Gold Mountain—America—after being sold into servitude by her parents. And Moon, married to a doctor of traditional Chinese medicine, is educated and beautiful, yet her failed foot binding as a child has left her with a limp that lessens her value in the eyes of many. 

Each woman has her own desires. Dove wants to love and be loved, Petal desires freedom, and Moon seeks justice. Together they face a ruthless society, devoid of goodwill and increasingly hostile to all three women, despite their different backgrounds. Set during a period of rampant anti-Chinese sentiment in Los Angeles, Daughters of the Sun and Moon is a gripping tale of an exhilarating but tumultuous society in a fever pitch, and three women who must navigate its unique challenges. In the wake of the real-life Night of Horrors, a long-forgotten, bloody episode of American history, Dove, Petal, and Moon are brought together by hardship and heartbreak, and they must use their bravery, endurance, and ability to “eat bitterness” to discover their voices, find freedom, and connect through solace and friendship. Together they are daughters of the sun and moon. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:07):
You're listening to the Saturday Morning with Jack Team podcast
from News Talks.

Speaker 2 (00:11):
A'd be sevent eight twelve on new songs, They'd be.
Katherine Raines has your book picture of this weekend. Get it, Catherine.
Good morning, Jack, and let us begin this morning with
the latest from Virginia Evans. Tell us about the correspondent.

Speaker 3 (00:25):
So you met this character, Sybil van Antwerp, and she's
seventy two. She's really grumpy. She's quite outspoken. She's very intelligent,
well read, and quite independent and very let's say, she
likes things her way. And she was a distinguished chief
clerk to a popular judger guy called Guy Donnelly and
her working life, but what she really loves to do
is write letters, and writing helps her express herself. So

(00:47):
the story is told through her handwritten letters to her
friends and her family and anyone else she feels deserves
a piece of her mind. And she also writes to authors,
and she has these ongoing exchanges with Joan Dideon and
Diana Gilward and Larry McMurtry, and many people write back
to her, and you get to read these responses, and
through these letters, she's reflecting back on her life. The
actions she's made and what they meant. She's struggling with

(01:10):
going blind and feels what you know, fears what will
happen to her and her correspondence and her relationships, and
these really honest insights into the things that she actually
hasn't come to terms with and she doesn't want to
open up about, and these close connections you know that
she forms just by kind of putting herself out there
and initiating contact. And it's not an entirely predictable story either,

(01:30):
you kind of know where you're going, but it's a
really emotional experience. The way she writes in you was
left you thinking about quite a few things at the end,
and very well. I don't always enjoy that kind of
letter writing type of style, but Virginia Evans has really
made this work.

Speaker 2 (01:43):
Well okay, yeah, very good. So that's The Correspondent by
Virginia Evans. Next up Daughters of the Sun and Moon
by Lisa Sea.

Speaker 3 (01:52):
So Lisa c really writes interesting historical fiction and often
about Chinese woman and history and sharing their stories. And
in this we're set back to nineteenth century Los Angeles
and it's a really reflective, emotional and heartbreaking book. And
you've got themes of emigration and prejudice and friendship and
family and belonging, and they run really strongly throughout this book.

(02:14):
And there's three Chinese women that are the central characters
of this and they met by chance in Los Angeles
in eighteen seventeen, and they're completely different from each other.
Dove was sent to America at the age of seventeen
to be the second wife to a store owner while
his wife and children stay at home in China, and
her duty was to serve her new husband. And Petel,
at the age of eighteen, is sold by her parents

(02:35):
in China and she's sent to California to live a
life of prostitution. And moonstory is slightly different because it's
more reflective and told from when she's eighty two years old,
and she's sharing her memories of her life in Los
Angeles and how her life changed when she was twenty
six and met Dove and Petal. But part of this book,
most of this book is centered on a very historical

(02:56):
event that set took place in October eighteen seventy one,
when a group of writers in Los Angeles rounded up
all of the Chinese people that they could find and
police turned their backs on what was happening, and the
Chinese were beauty bridgely attacked and murdered, and it became
known in history as the Chinese Matter of eighteen seventy one,
or the Night of Horrors. So that's the real backdrop

(03:19):
to what they're saying. And there's really memorable characters and
their support that they offer each other. And the novel
really raises a very important question is that, you know,
have we learned from the past or we destined to
repeat it? Really, it was a part of history that
I didn't know anything about and here since started to
read a bit more about it. An incredibly well written story.

Speaker 2 (03:39):
Okay, that sounds fascinating. It's Daughters of the Sun and Moon.
It's by Lisa c c is spelled see and we'll
have the details for that and the correspondent by Virginia
Evans up at Newstalks hed b dot co dot nz.
Thanks so much, Catherine. I'll catch you again next Saturday morning.
Next up Foreign Tongues, the brand new album from the
not quite brand new Rolling Stones.

Speaker 1 (04:03):
For more from Saturday Morning with Jack Tame, listen live
to News Talk sed B from nine am Saturday or
follow the podcast on iHeartRadio