There is cause to have high hopes for Bette Bao Lord's historical fiction, "Spring Moon: A Novel of China." If nothing else, there is the Prologue, set in 1892, in which Plum Blossom, the slave girl of the young Spring Moon, bitterly laments the news that she is to be given away [and commits suicide]…. Not only is this incident the stuff of folk tales, it also artfully prefigures the larger action of the novel. It puts a symbolic curse on the House of Chang that will not be redee...

[In Spring Moon Lord uses] an introductory section at the beginning of each chapter. This section may relate a bit of history, folklore, a family story, or a few lines of poetry, but each selection helps the reader to understand what follows without having to call a halt to the story while one of the characters or the intrusive author himself delivers a pompous lecture…. [The selections] clarify and enrich the novel without seeming to interrupt it. The problem of language is not quite so gracefully s...

Bette Bao Lord's ambitious new novel, Spring Moon, is a family saga which … attempts to paint a portrait of the Chinese revolution of this century. In keeping with this dual vision, Mrs. Lord has imbued her protagonists with political convictions of differing hues: Bold Talent is a sort of armchair reformer whose love of China's cultural heritage triumphs over his reformist impulse; Noble Talent is a professional revolutionary dedicated, first, to the overthrow of the Ch'ing dyna...

Chinese mandarin households are virtually unknown in the United States except to a handful of scholars. Pearl Buck's best-selling novels dealt mostly with peasants. Historians and journalists have neglected the aristocrats for the most part…. With such a gaping hole in the popular literature, it is no wonder that Bette Bao Lord's historical novel "Spring Moon" comes as a delightful surprise. Using the story of the Changs of Suzhou, a centuries-old clan of scholar-landowner...

[Spring Moon] so diverts, pleasures, and instructs with decorative cultural addenda (in glossy, uncluttered prose) that it doesn't seem to matter too much that the characters emerge from … a cool, calculated, pictorial distance. Lord follows the House of Chang, a wealthy Chinese family of Soochow, from 1892 to 1972—starting with the choice of a new Patriarch. He is Bold Talent…. [However,] the Patriarch's younger brother—Noble Talent—will become a revolutiona...

[Spring Moon] one of the most remarkable novels ever to explain the East to the West, follows the history of a Mandarin Chinese family…. Through the eyes of Spring Moon, a lively and intelligent daughter of the House of Chang, we see the beauty of the inner courtyard society and observe its respect for family, order and harmony, scholarship and poetry. But we see, too, how Chinese society's rigid etiquette hobbles the lives of its women as surely as their bound feet. (p. 75) [Bette Bao Lord] w...

This extraordinarily good novel [Spring Moon: A Novel of China] presents a panorama of those events which have precipitated China from one crisis to another during the past century. The personages, members of a privileged family, range from the most old-fashioned clan elders and their wives to the half-Westernized "returned students," and the thrusting younger generations, whose world is collapsing around them. One's interest is held from start to finish, so well organized is the compli...