Reminder- Book Club TONIGHT! Discussing The Dressmaker of Khair Khana on Twitter, hashtag #SITSbooks, 8-9 pm CST, see you there! My review of Dressmaker is here.
And now on to today’s post:
One of my FAVORITE books from 2010 is now out in paperback. Girl in Translation by Jean Kwok is SO SO SO good! It was in my top 3 books of 2010- see-
http://www.greatthoughts.com/2010/12/top-books-of-2010/.html/
To say this is a story of a poor immigrant overcoming ALL odds is an understatement. Kim and her mother are so poor once in the United States that their life is really not much better thanit was in China. They live in an infested apartment and wear hand made clothes. Kimberly Chang is brilliant though and her smarts take her out of public school and into an elite private school on a scholarship.
“If they knew that Ma made even my underwear for me, that we slept under pieces of fabric we’d found in the trash, they would surely throw me out. I was a fraud, pretending to be one of the rich kids.”
“That was Ma and me: two squeamish Buddhists in the apartment from hell.”
This is a novel though it reads like a personal narrative. The writing is SO good that you forget it is fiction. I was literally cheering Kimberly on as she overcame each obstacle, including ending up at Harvard.
There is a BIG twist ending that I totally didn’t see coming. I won’t spoil it- just read this book as I LOVED it!
Riverhead Books provided a review copy of this book for this post. I had already purchased the book via Amazon in 2010. All opinions are my own.
What are you reading and where are you going?
You know, my “To Read” pile has gotten a lot bigger since I discovered your blog, and I will definitely be adding this book to that pile.
Putting this on my “To Read” list right now. Thanks for the suggestion.
Leslie,
So glad to increase your pile
!
Andrea