Everything Lewis published dealt with China; thus, in subject matter at least, all of her titles are related and shed further illumination on her best-known work, Young Fu of the Upper Yangtze.

Very similar in tone and approach is Ho-Ming, Girl of New China, which is set in the same time period and is also a bildungsroman, a tale of a Chinese girl's growth toward maturity. Traditional Chinese gender-attitudes play a major role in this novel. Lewis's last novel, To Beat a Tiger, One Needs a Brother's Help, examines a group of sixteen Chinese boys living at the edge of Shanghai, the "city of despair." The "tiger" is extreme poverty, and these boys do everything they can to "beat" the tiger, to help one another survive. Once again, the political complexities and contentions of Nationalists and Communists figure importantly, but in this work the dominant historical...