(4) 4-6 Fourteen-year-old Chu Ju runs away from her village in southern China when her family's second daughter is born and her grandmother plans to give the baby away. The satisfying if implausible story (stoic heroine triumphs over poverty and harsh laws) is too formulaic to put us inside an individual mind and heart, or to convey a specific sense of place.

Reviewer: Margaret A. Chang | Horn Book Magazine Issue: May, 2004

(2) 4-6 Bedard shortens and simplifies twenty-three stories out of hundreds gathered by seventeenth-century Shandong scholar Pu Songling and commonly titled Liaozhai zhiyi. Replete with haunted monasteries, spirit brides and seducers, wandering souls, and vengeful ghosts, Bedard's retelling gives Western readers a chance to enter a world created by a distinctively Chinese imagination.

Reviewer: Margaret A. Chang | Horn Book Magazine Issue: January, 2004

(2) K-3 In this version of the European folktale, three Buddhist monks investigate the nature of happiness by feeding the inhabitants of a Chinese village soup made from three stones. The muted blue and gray watercolors are ideally suited to portraying the inhospitable village, as well as the girl who draws the other villagers from behind their locked doors. This serving of fusion cuisine is delicious and satisfying. A detailed author's note is appended.

Reviewer: Margaret A. Chang | Horn Book Magazine Issue: March, 2003

(3) 1-3 Illustrated by Lesley Liu. Chang, the mute fisherman's son introduced in Bird Boy, expresses himself by communing with cormorants and playing his flute. When a flood nearly destroys his family's houseboat, Chang's flute-playing helps them recover. Accessible to early readers, this story of village life on China's Li River is accompanied by tender illustrations of a loving modern family following ancient ways.

Reviewer: Margaret A. Chang

(1) 4-6 Illustrated by Harvey Chan. These ten original ghost stories, alternately tragic, ironic, and gentle, are informed by two millennia of Chinese tales about wandering souls. Chinese-Canadian archivist and storyteller Yee dramatizes the killing work, the broken dreams, the humiliation, loneliness, heartbreak, and loss experienced by Southern-Chinese immigrants to North America over the past one hundred years. A rough-hewn black-and-white illustration introduces each story.

Reviewer: Margaret A. Chang | Horn Book Magazine Issue: January, 2003