Colorado Kids Book Reviews

Fighting for peace. This book totally emphasizes the reality that you have to fight for what you want, even when the odds are 1,000,000 to 1. When four people betray their family and clan, the odds quickly change. For the worse. Will they defeat the odds? Or perish with all hope?

Mountain Light starts in China with everyone against each other. In China, there are dynasties and clans. There are several clans within the dynasties. Because they're in the same dynasty, the clans should be friends. Guess what? In the Golden Monkey Dynasty, they're not. Most likely, that's not going to change.

Squeaky is a man from the Young's clan. Cassia is a woman from the Three Willows clan. They both see that the only real enemy is the Manchu Dynasty. So, Squeaky and Cassia ( from opposite clans ) and her two friends go off to fight the Manchus. They fight as long and as hard as they can, but they quickly learn that 4 against 1,000,000 just isn't going to work.

Because of that adventure, Cassia is Squeaky's friend, and the other way around. Because of that friendship, their clans now hate them. In fact, they hate them so much, that Squeaky's cousin Lumpy murdered Squeaky's friend Ducky. Now, the clans are ready to kill more than one person. So Squeaky had to get away, for the sake of his life. Somewhere far, far, far, far away--America. In America, Squeaky has to battle the odds yet again. He meets Cassia's Brother Foxfire and tries his luck in the goldfields. With the people of the land against him, it is the biggest risk he has ever taken.

I definitely recommend this book. It was funny, it was interesting, and it had a good lesson to it. However, it was sort of distracting at parts of the book when the story went from battling the Manchus to escaping angry clans, to America. Also, I noticed that most of the names in the book ended in "y". For example: Squeaky, Ducky, Lumpy, Tiny- I mean, get real, Chinese names are totally different!!!

11-15 year olds would enjoy this book most. I sure did! (June, 2001)

A CK Reader Responds

My name is Alexis and I am currently reading the book Mountain Light in my school. I really enjoyed your review. It was well thought out and described. I really enjoy the book. I have read it twice and it is really fun to read. (March, 2002)