SOURCE: "The Smashing of a Child's World," in Los Angeles Times Book Review, September 10, 1995, pp. 3, 10.

In the following mixed review, Eder finds The Tent of Orange Mist to be "in some ways a small masterpiece," yet identifies several qualities of West's writing that he finds "irritating."

Like J. G. Ballard's Empire of the Sun, the agony in Paul West's The Tent of Orange Mist lies in a drowning of what Yeats called the ceremony of innocence. In both books the ceremony belongs to children who must face, by themselves, the savagery of modern war. In both books the terror comes with the Japanese invasion of China; at the start of World War II in one case, and just before it in the other.

In Empire a 12-year-old English boy, separated from his family by the chaos of the Japanese attack on Shanghai, makes his way home to find...