*Starred Review* Shepard's (The Bad Boy's Wife, 2004) latest offering is an elucidating historical novel peopled with a cast of emotionally fragile, intertwined characters. Calvin Sampson is a real-life shoe manufacturer in North Adams, Massachusetts, who, in 1870, struggles with the unionizing of his workers and replaces them with 75 Chinese laborers, the Celestials, who he recruits from California. Most are under 20 years old, and only the foreman speaks English, so Calvin's wife, Julia, organizes the townswomen to teach them their new language. Julia, who has survived 13 miscarriages, is joined by, among others, young Lucy, a rape victim who sees the endeavor as a way of moving on with her life; and her friend Ida, who has been assisting Lucy in her recovery. Shepard sprinkles her story with authentic period details and adroitly explores the many ways this Chinese experiment affects the small Massachusetts town. When Julia mysteriously disappears for seven months, and returns carrying a mixed-race child, the novel takes on a dimension of suspense. The Celestials is a mesmerizing exploration of one intriguing period in American history and the heart-wrenching consequences of actions perhaps taken too lightly.--Donovan, Deborah Copyright 2010 Booklist

Shepard's (An Empire of Women, 2000, etc.) latest novel is based on a true piece of labor history: In 1870, Calvin Sampson, who owned a shoe factory in North Adams, Mass., broke a strike by importing 75 Chinese immigrants who worked at reduced rates. Shepard's story is less about labor issues than the psychological effect that these new faces and this exotic culture had on the locals, who still pictured China as the "Celestial Empire" and the new arrivals as the Celestials. Though Sampson was real, most of the characters are fictional. Shepard's most vivid creation is foreman Charlie Sing, who is the one Celestial to fully assimilate: He buries one of the immigrants in a Christian grave and keeps his loyalties divided when resolving issues between immigrants and management. More notably, he has a love affair with Sampson's wife, Julia, who tries unsuccessfully to deny that her newborn child is of mixed heritage. Everyone else in the story has their lives changed by the Celestials' arrival, including union organizer Alfred Robinson and his sister Lucy, who has survived a sexual assault. Teenage Ida Wilburn is initially hiding a passion for her best friend Lucy, but she too finds herself in love with Charlie. The narration plays with time throughout the book, flashing forward to the characters' eventual destinies. Shepard maintains an effective air of mystery throughout, hinting at the transformation that the Celestials' arrival had on the community. Balancing cultural history with soap opera isn't easy, but Shepard manages to succeed on both counts.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Industrialist Calvin Sampson manages a successful shoe factory in North Adams, MA, in 1870 but is troubled by union demands. To break a strike, he takes the unusual step of importing workers from San Francisco-young Chinese men, most of them teenagers. Thus begins North Adams's decade-long experiment with the Celestials, as the workers are called, since China was then known as the Celestial Kingdom. The strikers notwithstanding, most citizens of North Adams accept the strange boys, and many women volunteer to teach them English; this leads to some close friendships. When Sampson's wife, Julia, returns to town with a mixed-race infant after months away, cracks appear in relationships, not only between Sampson and Julia and within the community, but also among the Chinese workers themselves. VERDICT Based on true events meticulously researched by Shepard (Don't I Know You?; The Bad Boy's Wife), this compelling, elegantly written literary-historical novel transports the reader to 19th-century industrial New England. It should appeal particularly to readers of Chinese American-themed literature.-Nancy H. Fontaine, Norwich P.L., VT (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

ON a June morning in 1870, 75 Celestials came to earth in North Adams, Mass. They were Chinese men - 19th-century Americans knew China as "the Celestial Empire" - mostly teenagers, and they had just traveled for two weeks by train to New England from San Francisco to work as strikebreakers in Calvin T. Sampson's shoe factory. The infuriated strikers, members of the Order of the Knights of St Crispin, massed at the railroad station armed with clubs and rifles. Reporters from Boston looked on warily. Hundreds of agitated townspeople spilled over into the adjoining streets, a dangerous crowd. Sampson himself greeted the train, holding open his coat to show his pistols and insisting, "Make way." Two spectators threw stones. But mostly, the crowd went silent, amazed at the sight of the gold-complexioned, almond-eyed boys in their exotic blue blouses and soft slippers. Two by two, they passed through the dumbstruck spectators. At the factory Sampson had a photographer waiting, and a group picture was taken on the south lawn. Soon, the men would enter the factory and the life of the town. Karen Shepard, herself ChineseAmerican, has taken the scholarly record of the Celestials' years in North Adams and refashioned it into a richly detailed novel, her fourth. For the historical Sampson and his reclusive wife, Julia, she has imagined a profound marital tension over their inability to have children (factually correct: they were childless and lived in a hotel). And because in fiction the triangle, not the circle, is the perfect figure, she has also imagined a Celestial lover for Julia - and, to ignite the plot, a mixed-race baby. Of the historical Chinese shoemakers, Shepard focuses on two characters: their English-speaking foreman, Charlie Sing, who hovers uncertainly between his Chinese heritage and his new American self; and Charlie's enemy, Ah Chung Coon, who regards America and Americans with scorn. Paradoxically, Ah Chung will become a Crispin-like striker. But Shepard frequently steps back from such struggles to show the Celestials' quiet, unexpected transformation into North Adamites: their Sunday school classes, their surprising friendships (one will be adopted by Sampson's cousin, Fannie), their mania for having their photographs on cartes de visite, some of which are scattered, maddeningly uncaptioned, through the text. Drawing on the work of the historian Anthony Lee, Shepard uses these photographs to introduce themes of cultural identity and racial assimilation. Ultimately, she arrives at the undeniable connection between Sampson's strikebreakers and the passage of the infamous Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which effectively halted Chinese immigration to America. Every once in a while, Shepard's highly metaphoric prose breaks away from her themes and comes up with something awful: "The day was crisp and bright and all God's objects appeared as if spit-polished by earnest young boys in uniforms of well-pressed cloth." "Charlie's heart rippled like a cloth spread across a wide table." More often, though, her imagery genuinely illuminates a scene: "Attention had always had this effect, as if a lighthouse beacon had suddenly fixed on her, picking her out from a shoreline of gray rocks." "She could feel Ida's impatience like heat from a stove." And though some characters strain plausibility - the pistol-packing Sampson is far too passive in the face of his wife's adultery - Charlie and Julia step straight off the page, East meeting West in Sampson's "Chinese Experiment." A love triangle forms between a white factory owner, his wife and a Chinese man in his employ. Max Byrd's most recent novel is "The Paris Deadline."