Beware! You are going to read the review of the most heart warming book of 2021!

Book - Peach Blossom Spring

Author- melissafu

Suggested reading age according to me- 16+

My review- Like the cool breeze on a Calm half moon night, the book begins with the introduction of characters in China. There are lengthy metaphorical descriptions which breathes oxygen into the story. My heart goes to meilin, she is our brave hard-core protagonist weaving her way through lost family and war.
The book is fiction, but as an Asian myself, i can clearly see The massive amount of research the author has done and the fact weaving is extremely to the point. The Chinese-japansese war , the name of the organisations everything is accurate. The author brings a fresh wave of water with her writing to the literary world.
Renshu her son, the daily struggle they had to go through settling in one place only to be bombed to another. This book is a family story in every inch. We witness the daily struggle of the mother of how she sells her valuable scrolls, doing small jobs to make ends meet. Time travels with the story, we see Renshu going to college. We see the most beautiful things, actually we READ the most beautiful journey of the life cycle with betrayals, with navigating a life through war, death, loosing loved ones. The author writes and the reader breathes. Step by step as we travel with our characters we reach the orchard garden. I found my peace in this book. I found my Peach Blossom Spring.

*I had huge expectations from this book and it met all of them, this one is a shining 5/5.

*There should have been a trigger warning for rape.

3.5⭐️

It's a beautiful book about storytelling, emigration, identity and finding your place in the world.
I did love the importance given to the power of storytelling. The fables and stories within the narrative were always beautiful and poetic. However, not everything in the main narrative kept me interested and that hindered slightly my reading experience. The first half of the book became a bit repetitive and I wish it dwelled a bit more on Meilin and Renshu's feelings and capacity to adapt, instead of the physical migration from one place to another. Henry's part in college, leading to Lily's birth was probably my favourite part of the book. However, I wish the overall atmosphere of fear of being sent back due to political views was more at the forefront of the narrative.

Renshu/Henry is just so... naive and childish. I could just not relate to his part of the story and unfortunately as the middle link he was the most present throughout. Meilin and Lily were amazing and endearing to follow but it seemed like in both situations our main male protagonist was making things more difficult than it was necessary for both his mother in China/Taiwan when he was a child/young adult and for his daughter when he was an adult. I just couldn't feel the depth of his character and unfortunately ended up finding him very whiny and annoying.

I also did struggle to understand the conflict that Lily had with her identity. I am myself a child of immigrant parents and I am mixed-race but I never had such issues with understanding my origins. I think that the struggle is not something often found in Europe and is maybe is more prevalent in America as I have never seen issues that Lily had being brought up with any other mixed kid. I did find that it was a bit unrealistic for her to not act upon her need to know more about her origins. She lived in times when she could have easily made enquires and researched into her Chinese heritage if she really tried. However, I think that in the end, it all comes down to Henry's behaviour which made him even more unlikeable in my eyes.

Overall, this is a good debut novel, with beautiful writing and strong female protagonists but it just did not entirely hit the mark for me with Renshu/Henry being such a major part of the book.

This was a fascinating tale of Chinese history and culture. I loved the fables from the Japanese scroll and how Melin told them to Renshu. This showed how a war has lasting effects that span for many generations. From Melin had her determination to survive to Renshu living as a child of war, to Lily growing up in a multi cultural family. I was fascinated with their stories and saddened at how effected they all were by the events in China.

Peach Blossom Spring is an emotional family saga spanning three generations and nearly seven decades. The main character is Meilin, a very young mother who is displaced from her home in China when she and her son flee from the invading Japanese forces.

The novel covers a lot of ground thematically: it tells a story of unbreakable family bonds over distance; the comfort of storytelling; the trauma of war; the weight of surviving; loss of identity, language & heritage, and the importance of memory. When the book transitions into Renshu’s time in America we also get a portrait of what life was like for Chinese nationals trying to build a community in the US during the 1950s to the early 2000s.

This is historical fiction done well. For a start, it is interesting to read about WWII from a Chinese perspective – something I don’t think I’ve personally come across before in a book, TV show or film. The snippets of Chinese fable Meilin reads to Renshu from a prized, ancient scroll she carries were cute and interesting but also not arbitrary: the story about Peach Blossom Spring is revisited and is (obviously) important to the story and the growth of a main character. The scroll fables were also a great way for the author to balance out the darker events of the war.

I tend to measure the quality of a book by how much the author made me care about the characters, and I really did care about the characters in Peach Blossom Spring: Melissa Fu makes you hopeful for their futures, yearn for them to reunite, sympathetic to their trauma and saddened when some are met by tragedy. I gave this book 5 stars for that reason, as well as the fact that I enjoyed learning titbits about China’s history and the story kept me interested. I would happily read more by Melissa Fu!

Thank you Netgalley and Hatchette UK Audio for this advanced reader copy of the audiobook.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️💫📙review 🌸
Ad/ Pr 🙏🏻@netgalley for the audio of this book

Peach Blossom Spring is a moving and beautifully written debut novel by @melissafuwriter. It spans three generations and two continents to bring us a moving story of migration, identity and resilience.

There couldn’t be a more apt time to read this book.

It starts in 1938 China where Meilin and her little boy Renshu are forced to flee their burning city. As we follow their epic journey across China we see the horror but we see the strength of this woman. Meilin is a woman to be celebrated on @Internationalwomansday

As they flee her sewing basket contains all they own. Their most prized possession - a beautiful scroll containing the stories and wisdom of their past. Will it sustain them & help them find a future?

Searching for a home and that future, engaging with their luck and working hard, Taiwan is a place they make a home.

The second half of the book sees Renshu as an American citizen tortured by his past and unwilling to
let his history drag his new family down.

This book teaches us much about war, about displacement, about identity and the strength of the human spirit.

I loved Meilin. Her tenacity. Her calm. Her mothering. Her acceptance. A beautiful soul at the centre of this beautiful book.

To start, I want to address how utterly wonderful it was to listen to. I’ll be the first to admit, although trying to, I have not read a great deal on other cultures. I have in recent years been trying to diversify my reading and I’m so glad I have because this book is exquisite. It was so eye opening to hear about parts of the war I have read and heard countless stories about from another perspective. It is so important to have these stores and telling them to the world allows us to understand, sympathise and gains a wider world view. All the messages in the book are so important too.

I love the characters. And they all have their reasons for their flaws. For example, although Henry not telling Lilly about her heritage angered me, I think that was the point. I felt for the young girl. But having heard his story and how he ended up where he was, I understood why he wouldn’t want to talk about it and why he did t have the pride in his heritage that Lily wanted to have.

I feel that the only reason it didn’t get 5 stars from me is because it felt long. Which sometimes a great thing in a book, but sometimes I like a faster paced story. But understandably, the author didn’t want to rush the story. I did just feel it dragged a little at the beginning, but after a while I got into it.

Read this as an arc. This book did start off quite slow- the beginning had a lot of information (names, places etc). After the initial chapters of setting the scene, the lyrical writing really started to flow. Having the dates and locations in each chapter really helped to follow the character’s journeys.

The spanning of the story over three generations was beautiful- it was really impactful to see a new and refreshing outlook with each of the characters and how the actions of the previous generations affected the next. I felt everything that the characters did- when they smiled, I did and when they cried, I sobbed. Despite being a standalone, there was enough of a story to have a lot of detail but still finish with everything wrapped up- no loose threads.

This is a fascinating audiobook depicting the struggles of Meilin, recently widowed, and her young son Renshu and the journey they take from China (1938) through to emigrating to America (2005). The book portrays the difficulty of Meilins endeavour to find a place to call home which is based loosely on the authors own fathers experience. I enjoyed learning about Chinese history and enjoyed the ‘stories within the story’ that are told - similar to fables - like ancestral threads being woven throughout the book tying the past to the present. The narrator, Eugenia Low, does this book proud with her great and enjoyable performance. At times, this is by no means an easy or a light listen, but the rewards are so worth it! A captivating debut. Thank you Netgalley and Hachette Uk Audio for my copy.