Four Treasures of the Sky by Jenny Tinghui Zhang (audiobook)

 genre: historical fiction/paranormal

While Daiyu's early life was comfortable and happy in the shadow of her beloved parents, when her parents disappear and Daiyu is left to fend for herself, her Chinese village does not provide the safe shelter she needs.  With one tragedy following another, Daiyu eventually lands in America where the Chinese Exclusion Act means that her new home isn't any safer than her old one.  In the American West of the 1880s, to be Chinese is to be unwanted.  Can Daiyu make it a home after all?

Dang.  This book is SO SAD.  I mean, there are beautiful minutes and a few times I thought maybe something good might happen but no.  It is literally just a downhill spiral of tragedy from the beginning to the end.  There is trafficking and rape and brothel life and betrayal and racism.  I actually did care about Daiyu, I couldn't bring myself to give up on her.  I loved the look at the art of calligraphy and I always appreciate a story where a woman cross dresses to keep her self safe. I like immigration stories and stories about families-you-choose - but this one just had a gray cloud over it the whole time.  I can imagine that for Daiyu and every ever Chinese immigrant during the time period, life WAS this horrible and hard, so I can appreciate that the author was trying to help us truly get a sense of how hard things were.  I just wasn't in a good enough emotional place to appreciate it.  Also, a couple plot holes annoyed me and dang things jumped around in time in frustrating ways in the first half.  There was also a little paranormal piece that sometimes I liked and sometimes felt superfluous.  3 stars for keeping my attention and for teaching me about racism against Asian immigrants in Idaho in the 1800s.