Gold Mountain, by Yee, Betty G. (April 5, 2022). Carolrhoda Lab ® An Imprint of Lerner Publishing Group. First Edition, 288 pages. Hardcover ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1728415829 ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1728415826

teen/middlegrade historical fiction/adventure - in order to get the money to release her father from Chinese prison, Ling Fan disguises herself and takes her deceased brother's job working on the California-to-Utah railroad; she learns that there are even more dangers than she imagined as traitors plot to sabotage the workers' progress and threaten to reveal her secret.

This is a fast, well-paced read that features characters that we don't see often enough. It seemed to echo what I happened to have recently read about Chinese customs and Chinese-American history (except for the boy and girl twins being given very similar names), so it felt a little didactic and predictable to me but probably wouldn't to someone else that hadn't just been studying those very topics. The story is sort of adult-ish (relatively understated cover, TLF mostly interacts with adults throughout the whole book), but my library has this classed as "teen" (I think the main character is about 14) and it very much reads like a middlegrade novel, like an Asian Tom Sawyer except with the added "fun" of having to deal with menses and the vague threat of rape that young girl journey novels inevitably do (side note: I'm pretty sure Tam Ling Fan would have been able to kick Tom Sawyer's ass, but only if she generally chooses to be nonviolent). Middlegrade historical fiction has a limited audience and teen historical fiction probably fares even worse, so I'm not expecting this to be a really popular book, but it's not bad. ( )

An excellent example of historical fiction built on what limited research is available. What the author creates is a very fast read, but definitely not lacking in depth. Tam Ling Fan is a gutsy female protagonist who faces her fears when confronted with a nearly impossible choice: marry a boy she doesn't like, who will sell her late brother's railroad pass to pay gambling debts, or leave the only place she's ever known and disguise herself as a male in order to come to California in hopes of earning enough money to free her father from prison. In doing so, she not only learns just how resilient she is, she makes friends and helps uncover the people behind the acts of sabotage that are aimed at slowing the completion of the railroad. It's a very easy book to visualize as you read it. This is a great choice for any library where historical fiction is important. ( )