An interesting perspective on older Asian cultures. To think about being owned, sold, and traded as a concubine. The story centers around the generations of a family and their fights for freedom... ( )

All in all I thought this was a pretty good book. I liked Part 1 more then part 2, but for the most part it held my attention through the whole book. ( )

It took a few chapters for me to get into the book, but really enjoyed it overall. I hope there is a book in the works to give us a history on Pai-Ling's life before coming to the spice farm. It was a good insight into the life of women in China during that time. Few people realized the suffering and the type of lifestyle that was considered normal and accepted. It's amazing to see how one had to play the game to escape their own reality. I recommend this book and have already passed my copy along for someone else to experience.
B Mom

This book took a few chapters for me to get into it but once I got into it I was hooked. It is a tremendous tale of how a mother and her daughter both exert their agency to overcome extreme discrimination. I was really interesting in reading about life in China at the beginning of the 20th century. I had known a little bit but Fai does an amazing job of describing not only the social history of China but also the physical country of China. I give this book 4.5 out of 5 stars. ( )

What a terrible book. I would summarize the plot as 'women in China attempt to fend off the advances of Chinese men, who are uniformly portrayed as cruel, greedy, and/or rapists, until they can manage to catch the eye of a white (or part-white) man, who is respectful and loving and appalled by Chinese brutality.' Aside from the hideous racial messages of the book, the plot consists of a string of trauma, including multiple attempted rapes, that have little to no emotional resonance with the women who are the victims, and does not affect their feelings towards men, sex (when with an appropriately white partner, of course), or much of anything (with one notable exception, which seemed to have more to do with moving the plot along than anything else). I was unsurprised to learn, after reading the author's interview included at the back of the book, that in spite of the Chinese name that appears on the cover, the author is actually a British man who married a Chinese woman (just like all the heroes in the book!), and is publishing the book under the Chinese name that her family gave him (a neat bit of cultural appropriation). I was also unsurprised to learn that his 'research' for a novel set in the early 1900s seemed to consisted of 'living in China for the past 30 years' and 'marrying into a Chinese family that donated a library once.'

The book labels itself as 'in the style of Memoirs of a Geisha.' I really enjoyed Memoirs of a Geisha, and am fully capable of enjoying a good story even when it is somewhat Orientalist. However, Memoirs of a Geisha included interesting characters and an engaging plot (in my opinion), which can cause me to overlook quite a bit, while The Concubine's Daughter came across to me as a piece of self-indulgent wish-fulfillment with little to recommend it. Blatant foreshadowing (for example, a vow to kill a certain character at the age of 3) never comes to anything at all, leaving the reader to wonder why the foreshadowing wasn't edited out, and many characters were one-dimensional. I cannot recommend this book to anyone at all. ( )