Sheng-Shih Lin

Even when a book isn't beautifully written, it can cast a spell. Little Jade's story is one of struggle, suffering, and helplessness in the face of overwhelming outside events.

As a young girl living in northern China during WWII and its aftermath, she experiences abandonment by her mother, estrangement from her father, death of her care-giver grandmother, upheaval from her home when she is removed to her step-mother's parents' home in Tianjan to get away from Japanese invasion forces and to seek protection from bandits, and escape from death by the plague and subsequent near starvation when her step-grandfather's ice "phoenix eggs" (apt symbolism) are all there is left to eat.

All these adventures and experiences accrete to her before puberty.

Unfortunately, Sheng-Shih doesn't have command of novel structure and craft and her sentence structure could improve. The details of Chinese life in this period of turmoil as the empire has crumbled, civil war and world war rage, a people is ravaged, and families are torn apart is a bleak prospect but merely recording them in a chronological accounting does not make a novel. The peek into the era of ruin and transition that this book offers is educational but not literary. The details of Chinese diet, quotidian existence, family dynamics, mythology, and attitudes allows us to envision a place and time we can otherwise never know. Yet, Sheng-Shih is capable of inserting her characters into our reading life. But the narrative is not graced by interruptive soliloquies and dream sequences and it falls apart in the last quarter when the weak near-plot completely deteriorates into a listing of "and then" events.

This is not a chewy book with a lot to offer the contemplative reader, but it is a page-turner narrative about a dangerous yet fascinating time in Chinese history.… (mer)