Fran Martin's Backward Glances complements well with Mark Turner's similarly titled Backward Glances: Cruising Queer Streets in London and New York for three reasons: the former's emphasis on the textual representation of homoeroticism, exploration of female same-sex love, and focus on the Chinese contexts. Previous scholarship on this topic has endeavoured to trace the history of same-sex relations in China (Bret Hinsch and Tze-lan Sang) and analyse homoerotic sensibilities among the literary elites (Wu Cuncun). Like Wu, Martin redresses the limits of Westernization in the study of homosexual relations in Chinese societies. The main contribution Martin makes to this field is her pointing out the memorial mode, a culturally specific feature of female homoerotic imaginary in contemporary Chinese culture, particularly mass culture.

Through balanced interpretations, Martin argues what distinguishes the female homoerotic representation in contemporary Chinese societies is its self-contradictory attitude towards the dominance of the hetero-martial system. Briefly, the depictions of female homoeroticism in her selected examples simultaneously bolster and undermine the traditional discourse on homosexuality. She further contends nearly all the narratives discussed in this book are inherently “backward” texts. However, even though same-sex desire is frequently set in the past and represented as an unfulfilled schoolgirl romance, those stories can still be seen as commentaries of the present. The common “going-in” nostalgic ending, for instance, allow the (female) audience to share the sense of loss and eventually the masculine women in the narratives can be cherished through “a universalized feminine love” (p. 132).

This book commences with a discussion on the genealogy of tragic-love fiction dating back to the popular “mandarin and butterfly school” stories in the 1910s. Chapter two moves to late 20th century, looking at how Chu Ti'en-hsin and Wong Bikwan conscientiously rework previous tragic-love romance. Martin's identifying Qiong Yao's romance as the reference for Chu Ti'en-hsin's early works is interesting, as Chu is usually considered an heiress of the “more reputable” Zhang Ailing. Chapter three argues that Liu Sola's Blue Sky Green Sea shares Chu's and Wong's tendency of idealizing female same-sex love on the one hand, but exhibits noticeably the Chinese intellectual context of mid-1980s on the other.

Chapters four and five discuss the representation of tomboy protagonists in the cultural production of contemporary Taiwan. Martin maintains that tomboy heroines are often dramatically portrayed as injured victims without a (post-adolescent) future to invite the reader's (or audience's) empathy. She takes viewer responses into account in her reading of the two telemovies: Maidens' Dance and Voice of Waves. For her, what make the Taiwanese telemovies distinct from the late-20th century Euro-American femme films are their actual school settings, and their soliciting “spectatorial identification with the feminine protagonist in her desire for the tomboy” (p. 130–31). These films therefore create a “feminized community of consumption” (p. 120), prompting personal memories among the audience (either heterosexual women or lesbians). She concludes this chapter by proposing that the schoolgirl romance not only offers a collective repository for women's social memories, but also potentially functions as a cultural critique in which hetero-martial imperative is denaturalized.

In the last chapter, Martin demonstrates how the independent lesbian-themed films by Chen Jofei, Mak Yan Yan and Yi Lu have critically responded to the earlier cinematic representation of women's same-sex love. The films by these three female directors, for Martin, are encoded with both global and local sensibilities, as they simultaneously echo with the global-sexual environment and respond to the preoccupation of temporality prevalent in the histories of modern Chinese homoeroticism representation. Martin, in her brief conclusion, recapitulates the “looking back” characteristic of Chinese depictions of female same-sex love, asserting that the memorial mode plays a pivotal role in the making and remaking of Chinese female homoerotic representation globally.

Since there are many cases Martin could choose to analyse, readers may be curious about why she concentrates on texts that are comparatively mild or not strictly speaking lesbian-themed. Are other cases excluded because they fit less well in the schoolgirl narrative? It would be helpful if the selection criteria were specified. Martin acknowledges that the popularity of these texts is not necessarily equal to (more) tolerance towards lesbianism, and readers are left to wonder what might cause such discrepancy and whether the feminized community of consumers really has impacted on the acceptance of homosexuality. In short, what has prevented the personal memory evoked to be converted to a more neutral perception of homosexuality in reality? Are popular telemovies more successful than independent films in their possibility of challenging the heterosexual hegemony? The readers' responses analysed in chapter five are all from females. Does this imply the “memorial mode” operates more effectively, if not exclusively, in understanding the female same-sex relations? Taiwan seems to have a bigger wave of female homoerotic imaginary (as it is the lengthiest part of this book) among the three Chinese societies discussed. Ideally Martin could explore the contextual differences further to help explain this.

Overall, Backward Glances is a lucidly written and coherently argued book providing sophisticated analyses on how the love and desire between women are represented in various examples from Taiwan, Hong Kong and mainland China. It has opened up many points of inquiry into this emerging field of study and hinted at several future research directions. Despite her engagement with theories of film and queer studies, Martin's prose is a pleasure to read. This thoughtful work will be of interest to scholars and students in the field of Chinese (literary and film) studies and gender studies, as well as laymen curious about the representation of (female) homosexuality in contemporary Chinese cultures.