If you were to judge this novel by it’s cover, you would perhaps peg it as a light story, involving some retelling of a fairy tale. Something pretty that can be read, put away and out of your mind as you move on to other books. You would be wrong because a Circle of Cranes is definitely more substantial than the majority of its counterparts. It deals with a folktale that is not commonly known in North America – at least I didn’t know it – and the protagonist is not a first world citizen confident about her status in the world she is living. I won’t lie, I thought I would zip through the novel but I found the experience a lot more ponderous than I had expected it to be. While the retelling is a folktale, the issues the novel discusses is most definitely contemporary. The antagonists in the novel smuggle Asian (in this instance, Chinese) children into America and then put them to work in garment factories and other hovel-like places. They are overworked and underpaid. They are imprisoned like sub-humans and treated like animals. They have no rights and their only link to their families and the lives they left behind in their country of origin is through letters and these too are controlled by their bosses.Circle of Cranes is a story of a sisterhood both the mythical crane sisterhood and the more immediate, more real sisterhood that the smuggled girls along with the protagonists find themselves forming through shared experiences, losses and hopes. The book is sometimes a bit too dry but it is consistent in tone and delivery. It does not waver from its true purpose and that is to seamlessly intersperse the magical with the mundane. There are no enchanting princes on white chargers, there is not even a mysterious boy in a biology class. This book takes the average reader out of her element and places her stock and barrel into a world as alien to her as our world must have seemed to Suyin. I loved the glimpse of the different culture and how unapologetically LeBox narrated the differences in the Miao culture and the North American one. The journey Suyin goes through is gradual and I liked seeing her grow in increments from the child she was to the woman she becomes at the end. The romance, too, is shy and bashful and I liked how delicately LeBox wove it into the narrative thread.Again, I don’t think this novel is an easy read. It makes you confront the wrongs that are being done and makes you look at a very bleak sort of life. But it also shows that beauty persists no matter the surroundings and that hope is always present. It is just a matter of recognizing it. Do I recommend it? Certainly. It’s very different from everything else I have read so far.
