Tiananmen Square was a captivating and thought-provoking tale which cast a light on the life of young people in Beijing in the 1970s and 1980s. I was caught up in the characters and events right from the start and the story held my interest through to the end as we followed Lai during her formative years and got a sense of the political situation in China at that time. I am giving this book 4 stars.

An autobiography that culminates in the events of 1989 in Tiananmen Square. An interesting read. I am pretty familiar with Chinese history and culture but it was fascinating hearing about a regular person's upbringing. The Tiananmen Square bits don't kick in until nearly the end and then it's a real kick in the gut. I remember this very well and visited the area a couple of years later where, extraordinarily , nothing at all was visible or marked the atrocity in any way. Nothing. There is one revelation about the identity of a certain person and if this is true it needs to be shouted far and wide.
I would have liked more political detail about the ending but I think the author wrote this more as a memoir so that's fine

What an absolutely fascinating book. At the start I found it hard to keep up with the story but that was probably more me than the book and I am so glad I persevered because as the story unravelled it was mesmerising and so engrossing. A remarkable read

I found this a fascinating read detailing life in China in the run up to June 1989. I would recommend it to anyone with an interest in Chinese history of this period.

WOW Tiananmen Square an autobiographical novel by Lai Wen depicts her coming of age in Beijing which took Lai over thirty years to finally write her story. I found Lai's story to be both beautiful, moving and courageous.

Lai's story starts from her childhood in the poorer part of Beijing in the 1970;s and an incident involving one of her friends taking the blame for a misdemeanour she committed as a child would haunt her throughout her life making her feel afraid of standing up for herself.

I adored the elderly bookseller she befriended whom she addressed as Uncle who introduced her to many great authors when he loaned her his books.

Lai is witness to the atrocities which unfold in Tiananmen Square in 1989 when students marched in protest to having curfews imposed on them at university. Lai also marches alongside them in solidarity joining them in hunger strikes.

Communisism and martial law rear their ugly head and tanks are brought in to stop the protesters and lives are lost as they are gunned down. The government have spread lies that the students were planning to attack them and were enemies of the state.

I loved it when Lai's grandmother tells Lai to be strong inside like Cinderella the hurt chicken who became strong thanks to grandmother's nurturing.

A memory wall where relatives of the disappeared pinned up letters and poems depicting what had happened to them in the Cultural Revolution was bulldozed but this would not erase the memories of the ones left behind. Lai's own Father wrote an inscription for her on the wall.

This book was a little bit difficult to get into at the beginning and I almost gave up on it, however I'm glad I didn't. It tells the story of a girl who is brought up in China in the 1970s. It is written in a memoir type vain and is very emotional in places. Thank you to Net Galley for an advanced copy

I can imagine this book being a commercial success as it's warm-hearted and accessible, it has an unambiguous 'villain' in the Chinese authoritarian state, and the protests in Tiananmen Square have taken on an iconic status with that image of the protestor in front of the tanks beamed around the world. But this book wasn't a good match to me as a reader as it's more family saga than political novel, with about 75% following our narrator from childhood to university student. The protests come late and are described in sweeping generalisations.

And I guess that's a comment I'd make about this book overall: it feels generic rather than specific. I didn't really get a sense of what it was like growing up in China in the 1970s-1980s other than in the most superficial way. More time is spent on friendships, on family dynamics, than the insider view I wanted: there's barely any ideology here either before or after the protests, and I wanted to know how, for example, the CCP have a purchase on education given that the protagonist spends all her time in the book either at school or university. But that isn't really where the interests of the book lie.

When we finally get to Tiananmen Square there's a similar flattening and lack of complexity. We are told, always told, that the general population supported the students, that there was tension in the military who were not, en masse, supportive of Deng and the Party but we don't learn more about this wider rebellion or dissension in the army, or the government's response. I don't know, this feels a little YA, almost like all those dystopian fantasies where a small band of friends get together to raise a rebellion to overthrow the wicked dictator - only here the revolution doesn't win.

Rather than political analysis we get this sort of thing: 'I imagine Deng and his cronies, so accustomed to power, had been sent into a fit of apoplectic rage by this point' - well, maybe... but [book:Nineteen Eighty-Four|185900] this isn't. Which is fine, it's a different, personal, 'caught in the maelstrom of history' book - but just not to my taste.

I ended the book with questions: how fictionalized is this?. And the epilogue that equates Tiananmen Square with Black Lives Matter and other protests like #MeToo and abortion rights is an indicator of the loose political thinking that underpins the book.

For all my reservations, this is good on the narrator's family and the complicated ways in which they have responded to Mao Zedong, the Cultural Revolution and its aftermath. There's a warmth in the writing which is not sophisticated in literary terms: look at this quotation and see how that iconic image is hampered and edged out by the clumsy and puzzlingly inappropriate simile: 'That single figure in front of the massiveness of those tanks; it was incongruous, like seeing an iceberg float across the warm waters of Hawaii'.

So a mis-match between book and reader in this case - but I'm sure plenty of readers who prefer 'human interest' history to political and ideological analysis will enjoy this.