Debut author Jacquie Pham builds a novel that is a complex murder mystery and an exploration of the problematic nature of colonization. Duy, Minh, Phong, and Edmond are close friends at one of the most prestigious boarding schools in 1917 Vietnam when they sneak out on a forbidden visit to a fortune teller. What starts as a young boys' lark ends on a dark note when they receive a prophecy: "The four of you. One will lose his mind. One will pay. One will agonize.... One will die." A decade later, the final part becomes reality, and the three survivors are left to determine which of them is a murderer--and which of them will pay the price for their friend's death.
Those Opulent Days moves back and forth in time between the boys' friendship as young men and the days leading up to the death, and Pham leaves tantalizing clues for readers to figure out the identities of the murdered and murderer. The boys are among the richest and most powerful in the colony, but Edmond's very existence exhibits something the other three struggle to identify. As the blond-haired, green-eyed son of a French diplomat, he's representative of the opportunity afforded to Europeans and denied to the Vietnamese people, of the prejudice and racism steeped into the colonial systems of privilege in which these boys--now men--were raised
Those Opulent Days brims with lush detail and characters at once rich, corrupt, and ambitious. It's the best type of historical fiction--a novel that reveals new and nuanced layers of context within the structure of a compelling plot. --Kerry McHugh, freelance writer