Last Boat Out of Shanghai

Narrator Nancy Wu's soft, unaccented delivery is perfect for this meticulously researched audiobook about the Chinese who fled Mao's revolution. Listeners will learn about China from the 1937 war with Japan, through WWII, and up to 1949, the year of China's Communist revolution, which precipitated "the last boat out of Shanghai." Wu narrates steadily and patiently, recounting the lives of four representative refugees up to their escapes. The dialogue, filled with interesting idioms, is delivered in a singsong lilt. Wu assigns the infrequent non-Chinese characters voices without accents. The lives of the four characters overlap, amplifying listeners' understanding of this complex period of Chinese history. M.B.K. � AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine