Grace: An American Woman in China

Eleanor McCallie Cooper, William Liu, and Charles Ruas

"I am really interested in almost anything to do with Chinese, mostly culture or people who are from China. And I never heard of "Grace." And I thought one day and thought, maybe this would be interesting.

It's just briefly about an American woman who marries a Chinese man in the United States in the early ‘30s. And then they move to China. So, it's really just about her life in China going through World War II and what it was like living there, the Japanese taking over China, and then the Communist taking over and the Cultural Revolution.

And it's a pretty amazing book. It was taken off from letters that she wrote to her family members in the United States, some journal and then some entries by her children. And so, these two people took all that stuff and figured it all out chronologically and then interspersed it with historical events and made this you know really incredible story of this woman who lived there for four years.

The one thing I would say that wasn't great about it is because it wasn't written by her you don't really get like what she personally was going through. But that seems kind of obvious since she didn't write it.

I've considered actually writing to the authors and congratulating them on an amazing amount of, you know amazing work that they did. I would give it four out of five."

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