Book Review: Daughter of China & Across the China Sky

I buy some of my used books through a Yahoo group called Read it Again Books. Chris is a wonderful lady who started a used book business back when she was homeschooling her children. Now that they are all grown, gone, & married, she has thankfully continued! She mostly sells children books but does offer up novels on occasion. I trust her judgement on them & most are of the Christian genre which is what I enjoy reading the most.

Recently I picked up a few from her for myself & they have been gathering dust on my bookshelf. I picked up Daughter of China and had it read within 24 hours. It was that good. It is set in modern China (late 1990's to early 2000's). The main character is a young girl name Mei Lin who lives in rural China. The story revolves around Chinese Christians & how they must meet secretly & always fear being discovered by the police & beaten or worse.

I was pleased to discover that I had also picked up the second book called Across the China Sky that continues the story of Mei Lin. I hesitate to tell to much of the story because I want you all to read them!

As I was looking up the cover shots on Amazon, I discovered there is a third book called I'll Cross the River which is the third in this trilogy. The author is C. Hope Flinchbaugh & Daughter of China was her debut novel. It was an excellent debut.

The biggest reason I so enjoyed these books is pretty simple actually - we in America have it very easy in regards to our faith. We do not fear death or beatings or pain when we say we will follow Christ. We simply do & most accept. Even if they do not accept this, again, we have no fear for the most part of physical reprisals. Granted there are sometimes when this occurs, but not on a frequent enough basis to make us stop & think of how we will live our life.

Think about that for a moment. If you knew that following Christ might mean you would die, would you be open about it? If you knew that to not deny your faith, might mean years in prison doing hard labor, would you? These books have made me think about my faith & how I live it out, about how easy it really is for us here, about what I would do given the choice. I pray I'd do just as Mei Lin & the rest of her friends and family.

I highly, highly recommend this series of books.