Revolution Is Not a Dinner Party

G-Bach - I read this book for a summer reading assignment and to my surprise it was very interesting. This story was about a little girl named Ling who went through many hardships with her mother and her father. She had to endure having a mysterious man named Comers Li show up and begin living with this family. Comers Li was a man seeming to have many faces, of being a friend and a foe. Ling and her mother were stunned to find that Long's father was being accused of being an anti revolutionary. Ling had to help care for her mother as well as herself even while she was being bullied at her school. Ling faced her fears and found what true strength means. Overall this book was great, very interesting and amazing read.

Starred review from July 9, 2007
Picture book and cookbook author Compestine (The Real Story of Stone Soup
) turns to 1972 China as the setting for her first YA novel. Eight-year-old Ling, the spunky daughter of two doctors, lives in Wuhan, China; dreamy and idealistic, she often describes her world in metaphor (about her neighbor, Ling notes, “Mrs. Wong was fragrant and warm like a red peony, which always welcomed visitors”). But the lives of Ling and her family are disrupted when Comrade Li, an officer of the Communist Party, moves into their apartment. Difficulties mount as friends and neighbors disappear, Ling’s father is arrested and she endures vicious tormenting at school because of her “bourgeois” background (“At times I wished my family was poor and my parents worked on a vegetable farm... so I could have friends. But if my parents worked on a farm, who would treat their patients?”). Although her father has been jailed, her family starved and their books burned, Ling fights to keep her long hair, a symbol of dignity and individualism to her, though her classmates see it as emblematic of Ling’s “privilege.” Ling survives on wit, hope and courage until the death of Chairman Mao, after which she and her mother have a joyful reunion with Ling’s father. Readers should remain rapt by Compestine’s storytelling throughout this gripping account of life during China’s Cultural Revolution. Ages 10-up.