Dragon's Gate by Laurence Yep

[torachan]

Title: Dragon's Gate
Author: Laurence Yep
Number of Pages: 272 pages
Book Number/Goal: 24/75 for 2009
My Rating: 3.5/5

This is the story of Otter, a Chinese boy who joins his father and uncle in America to work on the railroad. It's part of the Golden Mountain Chronicles. The books stand alone, though, or at least this one does. I just picked out a couple from the series that sounded the most interesting (this one and one about the 1903 SF earthquake) to try it. The writing's pretty good, though, so I may eventually try to get the rest.

Sadly, I didn't actually know much about this particular bit of history. I knew that Chinese laborers worked on the railroads and was under no illusions about what the conditions must have been like, but I didn't actually know any of the details. So it's an interesting read for that alone, but the story itself is pretty good, too.

I am not a fan of translating names, but in this case since it's nicknames I'm willing to give the author a little slack.

Intro (forestgreen)

[forestgreen]

Name: forestgreen
Goal: 12 books in 2009
Definition of "book": Nothing work-related (that means no books about environment, energy, economics or finance); no fan-fiction (I read more than enough fan-fiction without a goal). No minimum page count and no re-reads.
Books read so far: 1

A little about my goal and my reading habits: Before I started to work full-time I used to spent my whole time reading not only fan-fiction but also novels. However, I've fallen out of the habit of reading the latter during last two years. Between work, various hobbies and fan-fiction the amount of free time left for reading non-fanfic novels has diminished significantly. I want to change that. So far I'm not doing too well, which is why I started with non-too-ambitious goal of one book per month. I'd also like to split my reading between German, English and Spanish authors.