All around her the day looked as she might have expected, bright, the sun just skimming through the eastern peaks, the up-and-down song of little yellow-throated birds. In that moment, she understood the nature of her life: an outlier. In 1883, a young Chinese woman is sold by her father to human traffickers and forcibly taken from her family and home in the mountains of Hunan. Facing brutality and deprivation, Ya Zhen must forge within herself a...