If you loved Snow Flower and the Secret Fan (as I and many of my friends did), you will love this new book by Lisa See too. Shanghai Girls follows the lives of sisters Pearl and May, who we first meet in Shanghai in the 1930's when they are comfortably bourgeois "beautiful girls" of 21 and 18. The novel follows their lives for the next 20 years, through tragedy, joy, and everything else that life can throw at you.
See does a fabulous job (in my uneducated opinion) of capturing life for the Chinese who fled their country ahead of the Japanese, came to an America that really didn't want them, and made a life as best they could. But this novel is not just a touching and sometimes discomfiting historical novel, nor is it just a study of East vs. West; it is in its essence a story of sisterhood. Pearl and May go through so many life events together, and at the end of the novel we learn how differently they experienced those events. Still, no matter their problems and their differences, they still have their "sister love."
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Have you also read Peony in Love? It follows Snow Flower chronologically... Love her books, too! :)
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