To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Zhang shines a scathing light on the history of the USA's treatment of Chinese people, whilst creating a heroine and cast of characters that really stay.

Set in the late 1800s this book follows a young girl who is kidnapped from China and smuggled to America where she is forced to adopts many different personas as a way to survive. Something about the man’s hand on my shoulder, the calm heat of it, tells me that if I do, we will never leave this place. Fierce and moving…Zhang delves into the history of violence and prejudice against Chinese people in the U.A Most Anticipated Book ( The New York Times Book Review, Washington Post, Oprah Daily, BuzzFeed, BookRiot, LitHub, Goodreads, The Millions, Bustle, Business Insider, Ms. However, there are a few events that require suspension of disbelief, and it occasionally feels a bit more contemporary than the time period. Her troubles begin with her name; Daiyu’s eponym is Lin Daiyu, a tragic figure of legend who dies spitting blood after the family of her beloved tricks him into marrying someone else. Jenny Tinghui Zhang has given us characters to love and root for, and she has pinned to the page the daily devastations that they have faced…But what Zhang has also given us is the power of reclamation, of holding the brush in your own hand and telling your own story. Like the first domino falling, her parents disappear and her grandmother warns her that the same people who captured her parents would come for her too —urging her to run away to the city.

The novel reads with the spirit of an epic, spanning continents and years in Daiyu’s life as they are thrust into perilous situation after perilous situation from being kidnapped and sold into sex work to disguising themself as a man to navigate the violent white man’s world of 19th century Idaho. The episodes of brutality Daiyu witnessed and experienced in the course of her jouney are difficult to read. From the story of Dream of the Red Chamber, one of China’s four great classic novels, Lin Daiyu is a poet who fell in love with a boy above her in the pyramid of social hierarchy. The inkstone asks for destruction before creation,’ Daiyu tells us, ‘ You must first destroy yourself, grind yourself into a paste, before becoming a work of art. The best historical fiction novels uncover a forgotten part of history, and this book definitely did that for me.The aspects of racial violence will have your stomach in knots, Zhang truly delivers a sense of dread and discomfort as she examines how even with best attempts at assimilation, whiteness will play gatekeeper to the point of violence at every opportunity.

Held captive for more than a year, she is forced to learn English; smuggled inside a bucket of coal on a cargo ship to San Francisco; and sold into prostitution at 14. This book hurt to read, but it hurts more to know that mainstream American education just omits so much of our worst doings. This novel tells the story of a young, orphaned Chinese woman who is kidnapped and sent to the United States to work in a brothel.Some of the most memorable things are how beautifully Zhang describes how Chinese characters are written. The prides and prejudices of the Old West blaze to life in Zhang’s propulsive, fable-like novel…Zhang skillfully embellishes her novel with Chinese characters, suggesting that language is our most potent weapon against oppression. Based on true events, this novel examines the life of a young girl kidnapped from a Chinese fishing village and sold into prostitution in 19th-century San Francisco. So many aspects of it drew me to this historical novel, but mainly because rarely so I read books around the period of time of the Chinese Exclusion Act.