the serpent's children - laurence yep

The Serpent's Children is the prequel to Mountain Light, which I made the mistake of reading first. Cassia Young is left in charge of her family when her father goes to fight against the Manchus, and her mother dies, leaving her alone with her annoying little brother Foxfire. She has to battle both her aggressive clan trying to turn her into someone they can marry off, and a harsh famine, amid the uncertainty of China's political state, and her little brother's wanderlust and desire to leave home for something better. 

This one was really hard to read. It made me wonder about my own family's difficulties with farming, and think about why my grandparents came here, and when my aunt came here and was married to someone twice her age. There's so many questions that I don't have the answer to, and no one to ask anymore. I've only heard snippets here and there. I wish the stuff about the Chinese politics were more clearcut - in the next book, Cassia's Hakka neighbors become victims, and there's never a clear delineation of how they became so hated that their neighbors justified genocide. There's stuff about the revolutionaries, but they are not a huge part of the book, and the arguments Foxfire and his dad have about it are kind of general.