The Fourth Daughter: A Novel
📚 Why We Recommend ItThe neon of New York and the moss of a Fujian ancestral home have always pulled at Lin Meiyue’s life. As the unwanted fourth daughter, she grew up feeling like an unresolved piece on a chessboard—until her mother pressed a jade pendant with a stranger’s name into her hand on her deathbed, sending her on a roots-seeking journey across the Pacific. In the rainy season of southern Fujian, buried memories unfold like damp scrolls: lovers separated by 1940s wars, struggles aboard 1970s smuggling ships, silent sacrifices in a modern immigrant family… every page drips with tears and pain spanning generations.
A grandmother’s old trunk holds yellowed love letters; a father’s evasive gaze hides unspoken guilt. And in the cultural clashes with her New York boyfriend, Meiyue finally understands that “family” is never a chain of blood, but a bond stretching across mountains and seas. With prose as delicate as silk, Lyn Liao Butler weaves the identity struggles of an immigrant descendant with a family’s hidden truths, letting anyone caught between foreign lands and homeland find echoes of themselves in these pages.
If you’re drawn to stories of individual struggle and reconciliation amid historical tides, or crave the warmth of blood ties in family sagas, this book is like a slow-brewed tea—lingering on the palate, rich with the sweetness of love and forgiveness that transcends time.
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