Heather S. (thesnovels5) reviewed on 1/29/2006 + 82 more book reviews

Betrothed to a military attache in Peking, twenty-year-old Mary MacKenzie sets sail for China with a frugal trosseau and a suffocating chaperone. But Mary, a young Scotswoman, is lively, curious and unspoiled. The year is 1903, and it will not be long before she scandalizes the British in Peking bay falling into an adulterous affair with a young Japanese nobleman. Her odyssey begins in earnest when she is torn from her small daughter and turned out of the European community. How she survives in an ancient Eastern culture that barely tolerates women, much less Westerners, is the story of The Ginger Tree, a compelling novel that spans more than forty tumultuous years in the Far East--including two world wars and the cataclysmic Tokyo earthquake of 1923.

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