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The Vine Basket, by Josanne La Valley
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"A haunting tale of artistic vision triumphing over adversity." —KirkusReviews
Things aren’t looking good for fourteen-year-old Mehrigul. She yearns to be in school, but she’s needed on the family farm. The longer she’s out of school, the more likely it is that she’ll be sent off to a Chinese factory . . . perhaps never to return. Her only hope is an American who buys one of her decorative baskets for a staggering sum and says she will return in three weeks for more. Mehrigul must brave storms, torn-up hands from working the fields, and her father’s scorn to get the baskets done. The stakes are high, and time is passing . . . will Mehrigul's hard work be enough?
- Sales Rank: #314157 in Books
- Published on: 2015-08-04
- Released on: 2015-08-04
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 7.63" h x .65" w x 5.13" l, .0 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 256 pages
From School Library Journal
Gr 5-9-Present-day East Turkestan is the setting for this compelling novel of a Uyghur girl's struggle to hold on to hope in the midst of poverty and oppression. Mehrigul, 14, has been forced by her embittered father to leave school and work on their farm, filling the role of her older brother, who has left the family to seek a better life. She must assume the responsibilities of her depressed and powerless mother; show respect for her father, who drinks and gambles away their meager earnings; and face the growing threat that she will be sent to work in a factory in southern China. On market day, an American woman offers a large sum of money to purchase a grapevine basket Mehrigul has made and asks her to make more, and the teen recognizes that her life could change. With the help and emotional support of her beloved grandfather and the drive to assure that her younger sister stays in school, Mehrigul begins making the baskets, slowly discovering her own talent and creativity, only to be thwarted by seemingly insurmountable obstacles. The vivid and authentic sense of place, custom, and politics serves as an effective vehicle for the skillfully characterized, emotionally charged story. Mehrigul's dawning awareness of what it means to be an artist as well as her anger, frustration, and fear are palpable, conveying a true sense of the iron will underlying her submissiveness. The realistic and satisfying resolution will resonate with readers, even as they learn the fascinating details of an unfamiliar culture. An endnote and afterword provide valuable historical background. An absorbing read and an excellent choice for expanding global understanding.-Marie Orlando, formerly at Suffolk Cooperative Library System, Bellport, NYα(c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
From Booklist
A stranger had thought her simple twist of vines to be of value. This thought buoys Mehrigul, a Uyghur (a Turkic ethnic group), even while her impoverished family struggles to exist in the northwest region of China once known as East Turkestan, where ethnic populations, as in Tibet, are being culturally marginalized. Mehrigul endeavors to become an artisan whose basketry is appreciated. Of course, more is at stake than selling some baskets to an interested American woman. Because the girl’s disgruntled gambler father needs her to do farmwork, she is no longer attending school and, therefore, is a target for government cadres to send south to work in a factory. A grandfather who believes in her gift inspires her determination to make something worthy for her benefactor’s shop and dream of a different life. La Valley’s debut is at times slowed by copious amounts of background on the region and its residents’ daily lives. But when the focus is squarely on Mehrigul, it both engages and teaches. Grades 5-8. --Karen Cruze
Review
"In her debut novel, La Valley paints a memorable picture of this faraway people. . . . A haunting tale of artistic vision triumphing over adversity."
—Kirkus
"For many readers, this book may be their first introduction to the Uyghur people, and La Valley strongly evokes the culture and struggles of an ethnic group whose future is less than certain."
—Publishers Weekly
"Engages and teaches."
—Booklist
"An absorbing read and an excellent choice for expanding global understanding."
—School Library Journal, starred review
"The carefully honed plot and palpable family tensions...will resonate with most youngsters."
—Bulletin
Most helpful customer reviews
11 of 11 people found the following review helpful.
Fascinating and Beautifully Written
By Kelly
This is an engrossing tale about an Uyghur girl living in East Turkestan [now part of China]. I knew nothing of these people or what they face under Han Chinese rule, and I found this book absolutely fascinating. It is quite educational, but also completely entertaining because you see it all through the lens of the main character's life and struggles.
The story is beautifully written, so poignant that I cried in parts. The author is a masterful story teller, bringing you fully into the scene and into the heart and mind of the heroine. I read the whole book in 24 hours because I literally could not put it down.
If you've ever wondered who it is that works in all those Chinese factories making all the cheap plastic garbage that we buy here in the West, this book will answer that question for you. I wanted so badly for the heroine to break free and to have a happy ending. I won't reveal whether that happened or not, I will only say that this is an amazing book that has forever changed the way I look at the world.
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful.
All of Her Eggs
By FredTownWard
Young Uighur girl Mehrigul has a host of problems. Her father is an alcoholic and a compulsive gambler who drinks or gambles away most of the family's meager farm earnings, her mother is an enabler who spends most of her time withdrawn into her own little pity party of a world, her grandfather is nearly blind, which has limited his basket weaving contributions to the family income, her only brother has been forced to flee after protesting against the oppressive Chinese government, and her baby sister is too young to be of much help, so most of the burden has fallen squarely upon her 14-year-old shoulders, forcing her to drop out of school, which makes her eligible to be forcibly sent off to work in a factory in the south of China.
(With tens if not hundreds of millions of poor rural Chinese who'd kill to get such jobs, you may well wonder why the Chinese government would be forcing female minorities to cut ahead of them in line. The reason appears to be a deliberate policy to reduce Uighur numbers. The supposed-to-be-at-least-16-but-often-younger girls who go off to factory jobs rarely return home to Xinjiang/East Turkestan to marry Uighur boys and produce more Uighur babies. Some of them even marry Chinese men, thus helping to solve the gender imbalance produced by the one-child-policy, which doesn't apply to members of minorities like the Uighur.)
But then, a ray of hope unexpectedly appears. An American businesswomen who is searching local markets for the work of local craftsmen she can sell for greater profit back home because she will be eliminating all of the usual middlemen (which means correspondingly greater profit for the local artisan, too, by the way) takes a fancy to a whimsical grapevine basket Mehrigul once wove just for fun and had left tied to their farm wagon and offers the ridiculously large amount of 100 yuan (about US $16) for it. What's more, she offers to return in three weeks time to buy any other baskets Mehrigul can produce in the meantime because she believes Mehrigul's work is very skillful.
What follows is the most heartrending catalog of everything-that-can-go-wrong-DOES-go-long I've EVER slogged my way through. You will be tempted to quit, again and again and AGAIN, but like the heroine herself you must press on past all obstacles, beyond all hope, to reach the ending that brings a satisfactory solution to Mehrigul's personal problems.
Her people's problems? Not so much.
The Uighur are a Caucasian/Turkic people, Muslim since the initial Conquest, who have inhabited a Central Asian region hotly contested by greedy empires as far back as history goes because the Silk Road, the great land trade route between the Middle East and China, ran smack dab through the middle of it. Small in numbers because so much of their homeland is near desert or actual desert, the Uighur have occasionally been independent, usually at least nominally under some emperor's thumb, but never free as we think of free, except for the freedom of the frontier, the relative autonomy that comes from living so far from whichever emperor currently claimed them. That all ended with the rise of Communism because Communists are unwilling to leave ANYONE alone. The Western Uighur fell to Stalin a generation earlier than the Eastern Uighur fell to Mao, but today the Western Uighur are largely independent (if not necessarily free) since the fall of the Soviet Union while the Eastern Uighur are being ever more tightly controlled by Beijing. Interestingly, the Communist Chinese "Final Solution" for the Uighur primarily relies upon out breeding them instead of massacring them; since 1949 ethnic Chinese people have been forcibly relocated to Xinjiang, and the one-child policy was not applied to them until the once majority Uighur were reduced to a tiny minority in their own ancestral homeland.
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful.
A Window Into the Uyghur Culture
By C. Wong
The Vine Basket by Josanne LaValley is definitely worthy of five stars. It is beautifully written and gives you an inside look into what it is like to be a Uyghur (pronounced as Wee ghur) girl. They are a Turkish ethnic group but live mostly in an area now considered as a part of China. My husband and I think he is descended from this group so I have a special interest in this culture.
The star of this little book is Mehigul, a little girl who is forced to stop her education by her father. Her brother has run off to join a political movement. Her father who is a compulsive drinker and gambler thinks that she should do her older brother's work. Her mother is afraid to speak up against the father and lets her husband dictate what Mehigul has to do. The father's poor opinion of Mehigul makes her think that she is worthless.
But Mehigul's grandfather, Chong Ata, the most respected member of the family notices that Mehigul is learning his talent and skills at basket weaving. She watches him weave and picks it up by herself. What is more is that she has a great spark of creativity. It is this creativity that changes her life. Even though the customs of this culture are very different, the lessons are the same. Parents must learn how to respect their children.
I really enjoyed this little book. I learned about the foods that they ate, the way that the Uyghur decorate their mud houses with beautiful floral clothes, the hard lives demanded in order to keep their children fed and the sand out of their faces. But most important I learned about ways that children can find to escape forced child labor, get the education that they need and get the respect that they badly need from their parents.
I highly recommend this book for middle grade children and above.
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