Catherine Chung's The Tenth Muse is a rare example of a bestseller that I liked and one that transcends its clichéd back-of-a-female cover design.

The novel features an American mathematician who, during the era of the Vietnam War, goes to Bonn in Germany to take up post graduate opportunities. She has two good reasons for doing this: she needs to leave behind her lover and PhD supervisor Peter and the 'help' he gives her with her thesis... and she needs to try and sort out her identity.

She is Asian American, but as it turns out, her parents are not the people who raised her. Hers is a complex personal history because even had it been available then, she couldn't buy a subscription to Ancestry and discover a whole genealogy. Like many who are orphaned by war, she cannot trace even her parents, much less a family history with grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins.

The setting in the Vietnam era allows Chung to go back in time to when people fled WW2 Germany or 'disappeared' to become untraceable, and also, via escape routes through to Shanghai, to include events in the Pacific War as well. Refugees took this route after western nations closed the door to people fleeing the Nazis.

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I found this very easy captivating read with a bit of maths, romance, betrayal, ambition and mystery. Parts of the book seemed a bit drawn out but all-in-an an enjoyable read. ( )

Protagonist Katherine is an Asian American with a gift for math. She grows up in Michigan and comes of age in the 1960s. She pursues a number of theoretical proofs, including the elusive Riemann hypothesis. She must constantly prove herself and is often overlooked in favor of her male colleagues. The narrative arc revolves around her struggles to advance in her chosen field and family secrets that have been kept from her. Her search for her past takes her to Germany and China.

It is a compelling story of the hurdles that must be surmounted by a woman in a field dominated by men. I was drawn into the storyline from the first page. There are many ingredients that make this such a wonderful read – women’s issues, heredity, love, friendship, mentoring, identity, and storytelling. It is beautifully written and a pleasure to read. I have not come across many fictional accounts of a female mathematician and really loved this one! ( )

Lordy this was a whiny book. And did the author even know what the'60's protests and counterculture was about? I don't think so. While the mathie aspect was perhaps an interesting slant on the MC, I am not convinced the author knows much about that specific community. The story was such a downer as the sad tale of man-woe unwound I simply skimmed to the end. ( )

I found The Tenth Muse to be an even better book than Catherine Chung's Forgotten Country and I rated that book with 5 stars too. So 6 for The Tenth Muse? Perhaps.

Being someone who likes genealogy and tracing my family history, this book held my interest right out of the gate. As Katherine's story unfolds and gets more complicated and heartbreaking the story becomes all that more interesting and surprising. I wanted to keep reading just because I wanted to figure out the mystery with Katherine. There is a point, when more revelations about Katherine's ancestry are revealed, that you realize Catherine Chung's character has familial and ancestral connections with two theaters of war, forced sexual slavery of the Japanese army, the gender preference issue in Chinese culture and, finally, the holocaust. What struck me about this was just how deftly Catherine Chung wove together this story line and it all seemed plausible and real.

First and foremost, however, this is a book about the unequal treatment of women in many cultures, in the sciences, the workplace and in education. To me, as a fifty something white male, Katherine's encounters with chauvinism and misogyny were eye opening and enlightening. It seems to me, many times, that well-written fiction has a more emotional impact on a reader than simply reading a non-fiction book about gender inequality.

This is a more skillfully constructed story, in my opinion, than Forgotten Country. I like Forgotten Country because of the Korean cultural context and my connection with it, but I also like that Catherine Chung went in a completely different direction with The Tenth Muse. ( )