"A Single Shard" by Linda Sue Park is about an orphan named Tree-ear who lives with Crane-Man, an old, homeless widower who took Tree-ear in when an epidemic raged through the monasteries', who could not keep Tree-ear in fear of contaminating him. The setting of this story is in a twelfth-century Korean potters' village Ch'ulp'o. Tree-ear was content to live with Crane-man under a bridge, barely surviving on a few scraps of food. All of that changed, though when he saw a master potter named Min make his stunning pottery. Tree-ear longed to make his pots as good as Min's one day. He unfortunately had to pay off a debt by working for Min when he broke one of his great works by mistake. Though the work was hard and long, the young lad was eager to learn. He was sent to the King's Court to show the...