Ting-xing Ye,
Mountain Girl, River Girl
Puffin Canada, 2008.
reviewed by Margaret Mackey

Rating: E

Pan-pan is the mountain girl; Shui-lian lives on the river; both in contemporary China. For different reasons they each leave home, determined to find a better life in the city. They meet after their first endeavours have failed and develop a bond that lasts through many trials. In this hard-hitting story, Ting-xing Ye offers a view of China today that shows the underbelly of the Olympic success story offered to the world in August 2008. Yet by the end of the book, there is some modest reason for optimism: not a fairy-tale conclusion but an opportunity for the girls to work hard without being utterly and appallingly exploited. After the sorrows and terrors of this story, such a chance comes as a triumph.

This novel puts the whining voice of many contemporary Western young adult novels into brutal perspective. Shui-lian and Pan-pan, as naive and ambitious as many of their Western counterparts, face savage treatment beyond the worst fears or imaginings of most YA narrators in North American fiction. The author does not spare her readers and some details of their abuse are graphic. She is penetrating about the way that the girls are bound by messages of shame as well as by their physical and economic circumstances. One of the great victories of the book comes when the two girls, clearly already fast friends, are finally able to speak to each other about their private experiences of terror and humiliation.

It sounds like a grim story but in fact it is fascinating and highly readable. Pan-pan and Shui-lian are engaging characters, and they certainly meet with many adventures. The picture of a culture in rapid transition is clear and intriguing, though far from rosy. Determination and courage serve the two heroines well, however, and readers will close the book with a better sense of the complexities of life in our global culture.

Thematic Links: China; Child Labor; Poverty; Ambition

Margaret Mackey
Vol.14, number 2
December 2008

*Rating System:
E - Excellent, enduring, everyone should see it!
G - Good, even great at times, generally useful!
A - Average, all right, has its applications.
P - Problematic, puzzling, poorly presented.