Chasing Down the Moon

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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 core of strength that will allow her to survive. Her journey ends thousands of miles and a continent away when she's purchased in San Francisco as an indentured prostitute and taken to Eureka, a rugged and remote area of coastal California. This fledgling outpost--a coarse place filled with lumber mills, brothels, churches, and saloons--is bounded by ocean on one side and heavy redwood forests everywhere else. In Eureka, another woman, Rose Allen, doesn't quite fit in. Big-hearted, but hard-headed and outspoken, Rose struggles against the prejudices and social expectations of her Victorian neighbors and acquaintances--especially after she falls in love with the Chinese shopkeeper, Bai Lum. When she learns that several Chinese women are kept as virtual slaves at Salyer's Hotel, Rose joins forces with a small group of friends who are determined to help Ya Zhen escape her grim incarceration. But even as they devise a plan to get her free, a terrible accident precipitates the upheaval of the entire town, and tension mounts as the clock begins ticking for everyone. With a rich cast of unforgettable characters both fictional and historical, Chasing Down the Moon is based on true events that tore a community apart. This gripping historical fiction and literary love story will break your heart, give you reason to hope, and ultimately make you believe in the resilience of the human spirit.