Lisa See was raised in Chinatown, a member of a very traditional Chinese family, and she uses her experience and understanding of that culture to create wonderful, well-rounded characters. The plot development is rich and well-paced. There are no two-dimensional characters. As with all good stories, Shanghai Girls is more than just an entertaining tale. It reminds the reader that first impressions can be misleading, that you can't look through someone else's eyes, and that the intricate relationships within a family, for better or worse, are among the mose complicated and rewarding of our lives.

Ahab's Wife predominately takes place on the coast of Nantucket in the hey-day of the whaling industry, and a chilly mist seems to curl off of each page. Naslund is truly one of those authors that takes you away into her world, and you go willingly because it's such a good tale. Although there are a few threads of the storyline that seem to have no place in the whole scope of the book (maybe the author couldn't forsake her own opinions for the sake of a well-rounded plot?) the overall feeling of the book more than makes up for it. If you enjoy being swept away completely, this is a book to get lost in.

Girl in Hyacinth Blue by Susan Vreeland is the story of a painting. Suspected to be an undiscovered work by Dutch master Johannes Vermeer (1632-1675), the painting has a long, if uncelebrated, history. Through a series of vignettes, the reader is taken backward in time to the moment of its creation. These eight individual stories are like pictures themselves; frozen slices of the lives that have been enriched, destroyed or transformed by the painting.

In the style of Vermeer himself, Susan Vreeland uses the thinnest layers, laid one on top of the other, to achieve a depth of story that one rarely finds in much longer tales.