God of Luck
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
“ Held me captive right from the start.”—Alan Cheuse, NPR, All Things Considered
“Her clear voice and simple but elegant style easily turns this work into a real page-turner.”—Library Journal
“A vivid tale of a faraway time.”—Asian Week
“Beautifully combines the hardships and brutality of the kidnapping of a Chinese man, conditions on the slave ships, and the bitterness of backbreaking labor in a foreign land with the sadness and determination of a wife and family back home. . . . A story of emotional depth and truth.”—Lisa See, author of Snow Flower and the Secret Fan
“Will keep readers spellbound and cheering to the final page.”—Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston, author of Farewell to Manzanar
“I love God of Luck.”—Da Chen, author of Brothers
Ah Lung and his beloved wife, Bo See, are separated by cruel fate when, like thousands of other Chinese men in the nineteenth century, he is kidnapped, enslaved, and shipped to the deadly guano mines off the coast of Peru. Praying to the God of Luck and using their own wits, they never lose hope of someday being reunited.
Ruthanne Lum McCunn, of Scottish and Chinese ancestry, is the author of the classic Thousand Pieces of Gold, The Moon Pearl, and Wooden Fish Songs. God of Luck was a Book Sense Pick. She lives in San Francisco.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Ah Lung, the youngest son in a family of silk producers, is kidnapped and forced into slavery in McCunn's underpowered latest. Though Ah Lung signs a labor contract that promises generous wages and a limited term of employment, once he begins the journey to Peru from his native southern China, he discovers the wages are nonexistent and his chances of surviving the contract are only slightly better than those of surviving the voyage to Peru. While he endures being shackled in an overcrowded ship's hold, a failed mutiny, a shipboard fire and a cholera outbreak before being unloaded and forced to do backbreaking work in a guano mine, his family, especially his wife, Bo See, and sister Moongirl, search for him. Bo See decides to grow an additional crop of silkworms to finance her husband's rescue, and Ah Lung perseveres in the harshest of conditions. McCunn has done an enormous amount of research into both Chinese slavery and silk production, and though the information is fascinating, it tends to overwhelm her narrative and undermine its tension. The book has an epic sweep, but the reading experience is only partially satisfying.
