Adeline, aka Yen Jun-ling, was the youngest of five children. Her mother died in childbirth, and her father remarried a Eurasian woman, who went on to provide an additional half-brother and half-sister to the family. However, she was considered bad luck for having killed her mother, and she suffered their hatred and resentment for having done so. Her stepmother only had eyes for her own children, and treated the others poorly. Her father, in the meantime, was one of the wealthiest men in the city, but preferred to make money while submitting to his new wife's dominance. Jun-ling relied upon a supportive aunt, an encouraging grandfather, and her friends at school to eventually transcend the injustice and abuse heaped upon her at every turn.

This autobiography is written with the YA audience in mind, but there is also an adult version entitled Falling Leaves. Jun-ling's book is very powerful. Not only is it a record of an important transitional time in Chinese history--- grandmother's bound feet, French and Japanese possession of Chinese territory, World War II, China's civil war that ended in 1949--- but it's also an interesting perspective into the workings of a wealthy Chinese banking family, with its emphasis on hierarchy and embrace of fashionable Western culture. While Jun-ling's sufferings were heartbreaking, it's even more poignant to realize that she was comparatively lucky in a time when infants were being abandoned to the weather, children were being sold into slavery or left in orphanages. A very powerful, moving story that is highly recommended.

Who hasn't thought, at one point or another, that it would be cool to live in a castle? Judy and Peter didn't have much money, but they had a dream: to save and restore a crumbling Welsh castle.

This book isn't meant to be a step-by-step technical essay about how they went about their restorations. Rather, it's a story about two people who were caught up in the romantic notions of their dream... and then having to struggle with reality of freezing castle rooms, flooding rivers, crumbling stone walls, gardens run wild, squatters living in their gatehouse, rambunctious wedding guests, and self-centered tourists, with the occasional ghost (both human and animal) thrown into the mix, with almost no money on top of it all. It's fun and readable story about two people pursuing their dream no matter what.