Miles reads most of the novel in the role of Li-yan, a girl of the Akha, one of China's 55 ethnic minority groups. She works well as a breathy 10-year-old, but doesn't seem to mature much in voice or tone as listeners follow Li-yan through her painful teen and beyond as she becomes an accomplished adult. The novel provides excellent detail about the Akhas' eked-out life in their mountain home, tea culture, gender roles, and folk beliefs in the pre- and post-Deng Xiaoping eras. It then contrasts all this sharply with the life of Li-yan's abandoned daughter, Haley, and other adopted Chinese girls spoiled by American parents. Several other actors-Alexandra Allwine, Jeremy Bobb, Kimiko Glenn, Joy Osmanski, Emily Walton, Erin Wilhelmi, and Gabra Zackman-lend their voices for these secondary characters. Their performances are all strong, and the variety helps listens stay attuned through a long story. A Scribner hardcover. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

A woman from the Akha tribe of China's Yunnan province becomes a tea entrepreneur as her daughter grows up in California.See explores another facet of Chinese culture, one that readers may find obscure but intriguing. Li-Yan, the only daughter of a tea-growing family, is a child of the Akha "ethnic minority," as groups in China who are not of the Han majority are known. The Akha are governed by their beliefs in spirits, cleansing rituals, taboos, and the dictates of village shamans. As a teenager, circa 1988, Li-Yan witnesses the death of newborn twins, killed by their father as custom requires, because the Akha consider twin-ship a birth defect: such infants are branded "human rejects." The Akha, inhabiting rugged, inaccessible terrain, have avoided the full brunt of China's experiments in social engineering, including the Great Leap Forward and its resultant famine, the Cultural Revolution, and the One Child policy. Li-Yan's family harvests mostly from wild tea trees as opposed to terraced bushes, and their product is discovered by a connoisseur, Huang, who will alter Li-Yan's destiny. The Akha encourage youthful sexual experimentation, but progeny outside marriage are automatically "rejects." So when Li-Yan discovers she is pregnant by her absent fiance, San-pa, she hides, with her mother's help, in the secret grove of ancient tea trees which is her birthright. After the infant is born, Li-Yan journeys on foot to a town where she gives up her child. Over the next 20 years, we follow Li-Yan as she marries and is widowed, escapes her village, becomes a tea seller, and marries a wealthy recycling mogul, Jin. The couple moves to Pasadena. Intermittent dispatches inform readers that, unbeknownst to Li-Yan, her daughter, named Haley by her adoptive parents, is also in Pasadena. Haley's challenges as a privileged American daughter pale in contrast to Li-Yan's far more elemental concerns. Although representing exhaustive research on See's part, and certainly engrossing, the extensive elucidation of international adoption, tea arcana, and Akha lore threatens to overwhelm the human drama. Still, a riveting exercise in fictional anthropology. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

We meet Li-yan as a small, hungry child in a superstitious, dystopian world. She is simply called "Girl," and when she dares to eat a bite of stolen scallion pancake, she must be cleansed by the village ruma, a scary spiritual healer in a ceremonial cloak heavily decorated with "feathers, bones and the tails of small animals." This is 1988, and Li-yan lives in Yunnan, China. She is an Akha, an ethnic minority so isolated and remote they "didn't hear about the One Child policy for almost 15 years." See's novel reads like a folk tale or a fable. Li-yan is headstrong and goodhearted. Although she goes to school, she abides by the curses, bad omens and taboos of her local culture. But when custom requires that she kill her newborn baby, Li-yan can't go through with it, and instead smuggles the child to an orphanage, along with a tea cake made from the tea grove that has been handed down her matriarchal line for 33 generations. Liyan's life takes new turns as she moves to the city and resumes her education. But her daughter has been lost to her. In a parallel narrative, we see the child, Haley, as she is raised in Southern California by an American couple, Dan and Constance. We glimpse her life through doctor's notes, school assignments and emails. The book is steeped in tea: its medicinal and cultural value but mostly its nifty symbolic value. See is one of those special writers capable of delivering both poetry and plot: "As A-ma said, every story, every dream, every waking minute of our lives is filled with one fateful coincidence after another."

In a remote mountain village, the survival of an Akha tribe, one of China's 55 ethnic minorities, depends on tea. Rigid traditions prohibit Li-yan from keeping her newborn. She saves her daughter by leaving her in a nearby town, wrapped in blankets with a tea cake that hints at her distinctive heritage. Over the course of decades, See (China Dolls, 2014) reveals Li-yan's exceptional story of departure and eventual return. Interspersed with Li-yan's peripatetic experiences are those of her daughter, the titular tea girl, divulged by medical reports, letters, even the transcript of a group therapy session for adopted Chinese teens. See, herself partly of Chinese ancestry, creates a complex narrative that ambitiously includes China's political and economic transformation, little-known cultural history, the intricate challenges of transracial adoption, and an insightful overview of the global implications of specialized teas. The only possible flaw is that some may consider her magic-wand ending unbelievable. As this is her first book since losing her own mother, bestselling author Carolyn See (to whom it is dedicated), See's focus on the unbreakable bonds between mothers and daughters, by birth and by circumstance, becomes an extraordinary homage to unconditional love. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Bestselling See's latest will be vigorously promoted on all platforms as she meets readers on a 10-city tour.--Hong, Terry Copyright 2016 Booklist

Ruthie Ann Miles and Kimiko Glenn bring to life the mother/daughter voices that drive See's (China Dolls) new novel. Knowing her unborn child faces infanticide by the Akha, an ethnic minority in Yunnan, China, teenage Li-yan gives birth in a secret tea grove aided by her mother, a local midwife. She then determines to leave her daughter at an orphanage. When her circumstances change, she attempts to retrieve her daughter but learns that the child has been adopted and lives in America. Juxtaposed are the stories of the mother's rise as a dealer in the valuable pu'er tea trade and that of the daughter's coming to terms with being adopted and learning about her roots. -VERDICT Recommended for those who want a taste of anthropology with their fiction and those who enjoy stories of mothers and daughters. ["See deftly confronts the changing role of minority women, majority-minority relations, East-West adoption, and the economy of tea in modern China": LJ 1/17 review of the Scribner hc.]-David Faucheux, Lafayette, LA © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.