Barbara Ann Porte is the discovery of the year for me. Her stories reflect the complicated realities of our global culture: immigrant families, mixed marriages, the lot. But human beings are human beings, they have similar hopes, loves, aspirations, whatever their last name, their color or creed! Barbara Ann Porte delights with her exquisite, subtly humorous portrayal of the world we now live in, peopled with characters who could be us, or our neighbors...Her stories are entertaining and ring true. They make you smile and they make you think. A wonderful new author!

We loved this book. I read the stories with my kids and we laughed out loud. The characters are perfect! The everyday, routine experiences of family life - going grocery shopping, being stuck at home on a rainy day, learning to ride a bicycle -are told with humor, and insight. Read it - you'll love it too, I bet.

The experience of having a parent die is horrid. Everyone knows that, but in this book you live through it with Gillian. Her mother was the light of her world until she found out that she had AIDS. The first reaction to the shock, trying every traditional medication she can get her hands on, brings the two on a frenzied search. Gillian's grandmother has always held the strength of the family, and she sends Gillian away to her dead father's relatives. The adjustment from a world in the city of West Indian women, to a "ghost white" family in Tennesee is not easy for Gillian, and as her mother becomes weaker each day, they aren't on good terms.

The heart-breaking parts of this novel express the pain of watching someone die of AIDS in a way that is rare in children's and young adult literature. The first person telling from a woman outside the family makes it easier to take in the events.

Although Barbara Ann Porte has never been to China, years of research enabled her to successfully distill in these 15 tales some of its ancient essences.

This, she explains in the introduction, allowed her to move back in time to the era of emperors and empresses, court magicians, imperial concubines, and common people who raised crops, kept shops, peddled wares, fought wars and paid taxes. She traveled back across centuries, beyond the Silk Route, to places Marco Polo never mentioned. She 'crossed paths with foxes and ghosts, trained eels and dragons, musicians and jugglers, young lovers and bandits,' ' traveling as they did, 'on foot and by taxi, by river sampan, sedan chair, and camel caravan.' Sometimes, she hobbled on feet that were bound. And her one aim, she writes, was 'for the pleasure of the stories.'

The stories are quite unusual. Some are silly, including the 'Two-Parasol Person,' which tells of a woman who always carried two parasols because her mother told her to do it.

Others are fanciful. In 'Rope Tricks,' a magician sent his son into the clouds to pick a peach for the emperor, 'A Case Against Napping' tells of the philosopher Zhuangzi, born in 369 B.C.E., who was once a butterfly. In 'The Rescue of a Concubine,' Dayan saved his lover Amina with live eels, which knotted their bodies together and formed a pair of huge stilts he could climb to scale the walls of the concubines' courtyard. Fireflies lit their way. The captured lovers enchanted their tormentors in ways most exotic and strange.

Aside from the stories themselves, I best like the book's epigraph, an ancient Chinese saying: "There is a time for frowning and a time for laughing. In either case, it is a serious matter." Alyssa A. Lappen