Unbound: A True Story of War, Love, and Survival by Dean King

 I picked up a book on Sarah Churchill (a biography), but I was interrupted about seventeen times while I tried to read the first fifteen pages over the course of three weeks so I ditched it for now and grabbed another.

This one I have no problem with flying through the pages.  Wow.

Dean King has listened to and rewritten the true stories of several women along the Long March across China during the fight between the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) and Chiang Kaishek (the overall Chinese leader at the time).  They travelled ON FOOT for 6,000 miles (10,000 km).  There were only 100 women on the march and some crazy amount of men (in the tens of thousands - it may have been 100,000, I forget at the moment).  

More than half of the men died.  Almost all of the women lived.

They carried a blanket, a cup, a ration of rice and a pistol.  The women were from ten years old to their mid-thirties.  They were from well-educated and gentry class down to poor farmers and fishermen's daughters.  Some ran away from their abusers to join the group that promised them equality and a new way of life.  Some were involved in fighting, some involved in playwriting/editing and propaganda (or as King calls it, "evangelism").  

This book is a page-turner.  I think even if you aren't very interested in historical stories, you may find this is better than fiction.  (Bonus: you'll learn something while you're reading.)

I gotta get back to it.

Go check it out!

Keep on reading,
Ms. Daisy