Very well written autobiography of a young Chinese girl whose mother dies 2 weeks after her birth. Her father remarries a beautiful Eurasian woman, and all of his children are treated as second-class citizens, especially after the stepmother gives birth. Adeline herself becomes somewhat of a pariah, sent to live in orphanages and boarding schools, where she excels in her studies and ultimately becomes a successful doctor in the USA. The continued issues with her family are truly heartbreaking, and the book is almost impossible to put down. ( )

Interesting and heartbreaking ( )

Excellent.

Canceled midstream. Threw my arms up and surrendered. Such a horridly, tediously terse style packed with details that are so trivial as to make one's head pop. And yet such an intriguing plot.

I hate it when they hook you right in with some type of foreshadowing. It's the worst type of offense when a writer decides to say, "This bizarre and terrifically terrible thing happened" and spend the entire book explaining everything that happened before it (and I mean everything, from the late 18-effing-00s) until reaching that point (which I have not yet reached, and do not intend to, thank god) and realize that the whole book was a waste of time.

Please spare yourselves. Surely, you can Wiki this Mah Yen and read her CONDENSED life story in five minutes rather than read this book. Long, painful, and without anything to merit reading it, a quite futile attempt at interesting memoir-writing. ( )

The first quarter of is a bit hard to get into, but after that I was hooked. ( )