Excellent on all counts: characters, pacing, sense of time and place, narrator. Pearl of China would be a good addition to an Asian history class for any age. Makes me want to dig out my copy of The Good Earth. Did Willow Yee actually exist? If not, she should have.

As a whole, The Secret of Everything is not bad. A good light read. The children and dogs are excellent additions. Unfortunately, the author got so wrapped up in hiding Tessa's past that she hid things she shouldn't have. Apparently O'Neal forgot that a reader's first introduction to the character becomes, literally, a picture in the reader's head. When we first meet Tessa, she is sauntering down to the beach carrying a mango, a chunk of bread, and a cup of tea. We know she is recovering from a hiking accident, caused by torrential rain and a spider bite. But paragraphs later there is a miss-able allusion to a cast on her arm. Immediately, I was wondering how she managed not to spill the tea. Chapters later, another aside mentions a friend who died in the hiking accident. All of this could have been handled with more finesse and allowed me to maintain the willingness to suspend disbelief that is so essential to good fiction. Why not have her struggle a little to balance the mango, bread, and tea on her cast? Why not add guilt to the opening litany of things she's trying not to face? O'Neal needed to deliberately make so many things in this book not be as they first seemed. Why clutter that lovely mysteriousness with unnecessaries?

As I read Under This Unbroken Sky, I couldn’t help but be reminded of Rolvaag’s classic Giants in the Earth. While Under This Unbroken Sky is more grim, both writers were unafraid to show immigrant life as it really was, not the “streets paved with gold” of myth. Most of our ancestors lived some version of this life, no matter where they settled. Life really was – and is – primarily a matter of making the most of what you have and starting over and over and over from wherever you find yourself.

Mitchell knows how to draw multi-dimensional, convincingly real characters with minimal lines, letting us into the minds of each in turn, and in the process builds suspense because we know something about each one’s internal life that the others can’t know. Their lives play out in front of us, as though we’re watching a gritty play – or real life. Plagues and all.

Under This Unbroken Sky is not only just a “good read,” but also would be an excellent book for group discussion, whether in a high school or college lit or history class or an adult book club.