From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.
The were multiple problems with this novel which is why I can't commend it as a worthy read. The basic story sounded quite engrossing: Chengli Chau is a 13-year-old orphan who lives in Changan, in seventh century China. He feels a call to join a caravan traveling the old silk road across the desert from one city to another where he might discover what happened to his father (which he never really does), and he begins learning the ropes - literally, since one of his duties is making sure packs are tied securely on camels.
During the course of the novel he encounters problems, hardship, thievery, a bandit raid, and a kidnapped Chinese princess. And that was one of the problems with this relatively short (~200 pages) story: there was far too much going on! Naturally, no one wants to read a tedious documentary about an uneventful caravan journey even though, undoubtedly, most of them had little out of the ordinary happen to them from one trip to the next. But on this journey, it was like everything, including the kitchen sink (if they had such a thing back then!) was thrown at this poor boy, and his life on this trip was one long torturous trial. It became tedious to read of these endless miseries with no leavening whatsoever in between.
Naturally an author wants to spice-up a story, but the trip itself would have been adventure enough without all the added drama. It felt like too much - like overkill and as such felt unnatural - not like an organic story. The boy was constantly abused and threatened with having his head cut-off maybe a half-dozen times. It felt unnatural.
The other side of this coin is that the book description promises us that we can "experience the sights, sounds, and smells of this fabled desert route," but we really don't get a whole heck of a lot of that. There was a lot that could have been learned here of history, but all we did learn was of hardship. There was a lot more to discover, but we were not allowed the opportunity: such as of the kinds of things that were transported, the kinds of people who made up the caravan, the joys some must have felt, traveling and pursuing their calling.
But we really got none of that, and really, no smells! Sights, yes, sounds, some, but that was about it. I got no real sense of what it was like to travel and live in the desert. There was little to nothing that conveyed the beauty of the dunes, the heat of the day, the cold of the night, the mirages. There wasn't a word about desert wildlife or the night sky, or of navigating the endless sand. It felt barren and empty, more like a sketch of a story than a real story.
The description told us that Chengli was called to the desert, but once he began the journey we got none of that. His desert bond disappeared and we heard virtually nothing of it after that. He exhibited no calling whatsoever; no joy of the desert or of the sand. We got no feelings that he might have had of the desert wind in his hair or the spices it carried assaulting his nostrils. It fell completely flat because of the endless trials and pains he endured. There really was no joy in this story.
On top of all this, the book was poorly put together, too. There is no chaptering. It's one, long, continuous, 200 page story! One chapter! No illustrations. And so we can jump several days or more from one paragraph to the next which makes the story extremely choppy, and it robs us of any real sense of a long passage of time. As well as all that, we get false promises! We get, for example, at one point, a promise of the giant waterwheels, at an upcoming city, and then those water wheels are never mentioned again. The book was seriously in need of a competent book editor.
This had the potential to be a fun and engaging story for young kids, but for all the reasons I mentioned it was not and I can't commend it as a worthy read. Young kids deserve better than this.
