Book Review: Lady of Ch'iao Kuo: Red Bird of the South, Southern China, A.D. 531 by Laurence Yep.

Lady of Ch'iao Kuo: Red Bird of the South, Southern China, A.D. 531 by Laurence Yep
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

When I pick up this book, I have never heard of the Lady of Ch'iao Kuo. Never heard of her, though I picked it up because I'm a huge history lover/nerd and I wanted to learn about this time in A.D. 531, a time where Confucius and wars and everything else that happened during this period. But I've never heard of Lady of Ch'iao Kuo until now.

So this book is her diary and the first part talks about her short time living at her school in China with Master Chen and his family, and how she's learning how to read and write, because in her village women and men cannot read or write, not even her family. Along with all that, the Dog Heads (another thing I've never heard of) are attacking villages left and right, taking the heads of the people they attacked, and they also killed her father. That's what happened in the first half of the book.

The second half of the book was actually pretty amazing. She comes up with a plan to stop the wild elephants the Dog Heads brought for war, and used it (if I can explain it, I could....) but it worked, and along with all of that, her brother Little Tiger became king of her village, but the problem in the first half he was actually a bit of a prick and didn't listen to anyone, then he got better and actually listened to his people and became a better king.

I enjoyed this book and I really do recommend it.

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