The story, a memoir, of a young Jewish girl fleeing an affluent life in Germany to escape the Nazis during WWII was interesting from a historical perspective for me. I had never known much about the fate of the refugees in Shanghai, China, before. I learned that they were actually bombed by the Americans intending to stamp out Japanese activity, which I never knew, and that for years they lived in squalor and had to wait several years after the war was over to receive their visas to travel to the United States or other countries. Some of the details of her daily life, thrust into such different culture from her own, were interesting as well. Other than that, the book is supposed to read like the diary of a ten-year-old girl during the subsequent seven years of her life, but the voice is not a girl's. The reflections and descriptions seem to mature like an older person's thoughts but the text is interspersed with parts like "Oh, grownups! They can be so strange sometimes. I don't understand how they are thinking." It gets annoying to read. The best parts were the various wise words of a Chinese-British man, her friend, on a spiritual journey, "You will be able to capture your childhood from within, and you will sweeten it with the wisdom of your years. We are everything we have ever been, only more so. We are our own work." or "Dear friend, always remember. We come here to stay. We come here to go." I rate this book a 5.
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