Early Reviewers

In Straw Shoes, Mathias B. Freese tells the story of Ah Ling, a 19th-century Chinese farmer who gambles with Fate and leaves his fields for the brutal promise of Gold Rush–era San Francisco.

He trades yielding soil for unyielding granite—farming rock instead of rice, survival instead of certainty.But this is more than a tale of immigration and hardship. It is a meditation on duality: soil and stone, anchor and ascent, softness and strength. As the Tao Te Ching teaches, the weak may overcome the strong; the humble earth may outlast defiant rock. Restless and yearning for completion, Ah learns instead that life is accretion—laying track piece by piece, being rather than becoming.

Rich with Freese's signature dialogues, mentor pairings, and metaphysical turns, Straw Shoes speaks in a voice both youthful and ancient. Written across decades—by the man Freese was and the elder he became—this final work resonates with hard-won wisdom. The farmer who hews cliffs mirrors the author who has weathered time: softer in insight, harder in truth.

Spare, symbolic, and deeply human, Straw Shoes is a powerful farewell from a singular literary voice—one that still speaks, long after the last page.