Jenny Tinghui Zhang, did an outstanding job delivering this heart wrenching emotional - very personal historical novel.

A book to sit alongside Yaa Gyasi's Homecoming and Anna North's Outlawed, this is a powerful tale of reclamation, spun with soul by a remarkable new talent - Lauren Puckett, Shelf Awareness You may also be interested in. However, there are a few events that require suspension of disbelief, and it occasionally feels a bit more contemporary than the time period. The protagonist has the same name as a tragic mythical heroine, and their “relationship” definitely adds to the story. A narrative that is so visceral and almost impossible to forget, therefore the emotional story at the core of Four Treasures of the Sky pales in comparison. Daiyu is sure to take her place in the canon of great Western heroines next to True Grit's Mattie Ross.Brings alive a heroine for the ages, an indomitable teenage girl whose relentless spirit and self-reinvention carries this story. with a *superb* supporting cast of characters), as she comes of age under devastating circumstances. In an interview with NPR, Zhang says writing the novel during the early months of the COVID pandemic ‘ didn't even feel like I was writing about history. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. Despite its slow start, the novel is evenly paced and at no point did I lose interest in Daiyu’s story.

Four Treasures of the sky gives a voice to those whose story has been taken away- rewritten and revised. With that background, the novel touches on kidnapping, sexual slavery, sexual assault, the loss of family, hiding identities, found family, and racism on all ends of the spectrum.

But when she is kidnapped and smuggled across an ocean from China to America, Daiyu must relinquish the home and future she imagined for herself. Her fate also brings out her strength and her savvy intuition as she comes of age under horrific circumstances from China to San Francisco to Pierce, Idaho.

Zhang lovingly weaves two narrative threads, bringing to life a bit of Chinese history and life in China in 1870-1880s but also the experience of Chinese migrants around the same years in America. It's the story of a Chinese girl who gets stolen from China and trafficked into the US to work at a brothel, it's a story of five Chinese men who get framed for the murder of a white man, and it's the untold story of so many Chinese people who lived in the US during and around the Chinese partition act (I highly recommend listening to the audiobook if you can, it has an interview with the author at the end that explains a lot of her influences). and i am so grateful for JTZs father for wanting such a story, because i had no idea how much i wanted it, too. Another domino subsequently falls when Daiyu is kidnapped at the fish market by a dangerous Chinese gang. The author does a brilliant job in depicting Daiyu’s emotional growth through the years - from a trafficked child of thirteen in 1883 to a young girl who while admitting that she is safer dressed as a man also struggles with her feelings about Nelson, the young violin teacher she meets in Pierce.Daiyu does find a romantic outlet in the later half of the novel but it is thwarted simply because he believes she is a man. But the characters fall flat in Four Treasures, and they are not great vehicles for conveying so many stories and emotions. But when she is kidnapped and smuggled across an ocean from China to America, Daiyu must relinquish the home and future she imagined.

The spirit acts as a materialisation of what our heroine believed was only her, of what she believed was now only hers to suffer through: the cruel fate married to this name.Zhang’s debut novel imaginatively illuminates an often overlooked aspect of American history that resonates powerfully today, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and concurrent anti-Asian violence… Zhang’s blend of history and magical realism will appeal to fans of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ The Water Dancer as well as Amy Tan's The Valley of Amazement.