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Please tell me more Ms. Wu

Customer Rating:
I loved this story. I hope Emily Wu writes more about her life and what led her to America. This was a beautiful story about how the cultural revolution in China robbed people of there childhoods and destroyed families. I intend to read more from this author.

What an amazing story

Customer Rating:
Feather in the Storm is a heart-wrenching and deeply moving story of a childhood lost in the terrors of Communist China. The story opens as three-year-old Mao, as she is known by family and friends, meets her father for the first time - in a concentration camp. Moved from family to family and from city to village, little Mao finds herself striving to learn who she is and where she belongs. Fed by her starving grandmother and protected by her outcast parents, Mao attends school and performs her daily chores at home without complaint, maintaining her hope for a brighter future.

Mao's father, a university professor who studied in America, has been labeled as an extreme rightist by the communist party in China. Cast out of the university apartments, Mao's family is sentenced to live in a tiny village so that they can "learn from the peasants," becoming better citizens. Here, Mao and her family live in a tiny mud house which melts away in storms, leaving the family exposed to the elements. Forced to leave home as a teenager after high school, Mao is sent to live in a remote village on the top of a mountain where she falls in love with a young man she is forbidden to marry.

Throughout all of the trials and tribulations Mao faces growing up, and in every village and town she lives in, she is able to make friends and gain the respect of her teachers and neighbors. With an undaunted courage to survive, Mao teaches the reader that hope can be found no matter what the circumstances. Surrounded by death and destruction, Mao creates a life for herself and embraces those who struggle by her side.

Author Emily Wu expertly captures the essence of what life was like during this tremulous age, and helps the reader experience the drama from a firsthand point-of-view.

Armchair Interviews says: Stunning read.

Reminder for more compassion

Customer Rating:
Emily Wu and Larry Engelmann book "Feather in the Storm", an amazing openess of Emily Wu's life and history of China during the Cultural Revolution. The events that unfold carries the reader from youth to adulthood during a time of hardship and struggle which reminds us why hope and love is so neccessary and reasons to allow history to not repeat itself...

Prior knowledge of China's history is not required.

Customer Rating:
My wife and I met Emily Wu at SIUE while on her book tour. Her story was amazing, so we had to buy the book to get the details.

It normally takes me about a year to read a book, but this one I devoured in a matter of days. The perspective of the book grows as she grows. In the beginning it is written as though you are only a couple feet tall - the details are in the words she hears, people's feet and the underside of cribs and tables. Later on she gets taller and you start to experience more of the people around her. But, like the limitations put on a pre-teen, she can only see so much and know so much, therefore her story is limited to just what she could see and understand. You feel as though you are a child right alongside her.

Often I found myself trying to figure out what things meant (names of Mao's movements and doctrine), but that just muddled the story. At times you feel like more should be written about the backstory of the Red Guard, but if you think about the fact that she didn't know much about them at the time it leaves it all in that child-like perspective. She writes about what she saw and read and experienced as a child, especially her reactions to how it changed the people around her.

The tempo is well-paced and manages to catch you off-guard. It covers issues like capping and de-capping, the invasion of the Red Guard at the Anhui University campus in Hefei, book burning, cleansing of the "Old" ways, living conditions, food, suicide, female infanticide, arranged marriage, bound feet, class struggles, child-on-child violence and much more.

When you are finished, you will view your life through a new pair of glasses. You won't be able to go 5 feet without finding 100 things to be truly thankful for.

Hidden horrors inside communist China as experienced by a young girl.

Customer Rating:
"Feather in the Storm" is a fantastic book. It is well written, and enthralling. I rarely get attached to a story, but I read it through cover to cover with only one break. I couldn't put it down. I am looking forward to the sequel! It is depressing but enlightening. People are really terrible to one another. There is a whole generation lost to the policies of Chairman Mao in the chaos. This comes to light in this true life story of Emily Wu's struggle to survive.