From School Library Journal
Kindergarten-Grade 5?The story of two legendary female kung fu masters who may have lived in the last part of the 17th century. The first, Wu Mei, born to an aristocratic family, was educated like a boy and excelled at martial arts. Made homeless by the overthrow of the last Ming emperor (1644), the young woman finds her way to the Shaolin Monastery, made famous in television and movies. She convinces the monks to continue her training and becomes a nun and renowned teacher of kung fu. After she rescues the scatterbrained daughter of a bean-curd seller from thieves, the girl begs for her help in escaping a forced marriage to a local thug. Wu Mei advises Mingyi to postpone the wedding for a year, promising the odious would-be groom that she will marry him only if he can best her at kung fu. The year is long enough for a crash course, focusing on the development and use of qi, or vital energy. As she studies, Mingyi develops into a calm, sturdy young woman who gains her freedom. McCully steeped herself in Chinese painting, but develops her own fresh interpretation of classic Chinese art. She alternates a format of using succeeding frames with double-page spreads that evoke the sweep of Chinese scroll paintings. The last scenes, depicting the climactic fight, show that the result of Mingyi's self-mastery is not lost on the young girls of the village. Celebrating discipline and inner strength while retelling legends connected with styles of kung fu, this story authentically re-creates a period of Chinese history and gives readers not one but two lively heroines.?Margaret A. Chang, North Adams State College, MA
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Ages 5^-9. Like McCully's Caldecott winner,
Mirette on the High Wire (1992), this extends the picture book with
a tense drama about brave young women who find strength in themselves. McCully tells a kung fu story about two legendary women in seventeenth-century China. First, there is the child prodigy whose father refuses to allow her to become an idle lady with bound feet. Instead, she studies the five pillars of learning and the martial arts and becomes a Buddhist nun named Wu Mei, beautiful warrior. Then Wu Mei saves a desperate, scatterbrained young girl from a forced marriage to a hooligan bandit. The warrior nun teaches the girl to save herself with kung fu, and as the girl learns that softness and yielding can prevail over hardness and brute force, she grows strong and calm. In a great climactic fight, the small girl uses her technique to rout the bandit and send him flying. The defeat of the swaggering bully has elemental appeal, and there are great comic action scenes of the huge bandit hurtling through the air. In traditional Chinese style, the art of this large-size book includes narrow narrative panels that alternate with wide, detailed, misty landscapes in watercolor, tempera, and pastel. The pictures reinforce the story of strength that comes from mastering yourself and finding harmony with the universe.
Hazel Rochman
