The first in Barefoot Books' Young Fiction line, this sensitively written, real-life story focuses on growing up in Beijing in the 1960s, at the time of the Cultural Revlution. Little Leap Forward offers children an intimate and immediate account of a child's experiences as Mao Tse Tung's Great Leap Forward policy tightens its grip on China.

A Reed Grows in Beijing

By SHERIE POSESORSKI
Published: August 15, 2008
A flutist and composer, Guo Yue has subtitled LITTLE LEAP FORWARD, his first book for children, A Boy in Beijing (Barefoot Books, $16.99; ages 8 to 14). But an equally apt subtitle might have been "A Portrait of the Musician as a Young Boy," for one of the many pleasures of this moving story - whose co-author, Clare Farrow, is Yue's wife - is its depiction of how a musical child experiences the world as a symphony of sounds. The warm wash of color and the textured detail in Helen Cann's illustrations reinforce the novel's pastiche of folk tale, parable and realism.

In spare, lyrical prose, Yue and Farrow capture the fragile idyll, hard-won and precarious, of Yue's fictional counterpart, 7-year-old Little Leap Forward, and his family. (The English translation of "Yue" is Leap Forward, and Yue was born in 1958 at the start of Mao's Great Leap Forward program, which ultimately led to the deaths of at least 20 million people from starvation.) Food is rationed and scarce, and Little Leap Forward is haunted by the memory of his dying father's request for a fresh apple or an egg, which his wife could not get for him. A watchful, tender-hearted child, he is drawn out by his lively best friend to go fishing and fly kites; with the ingenious setup of a basin and a chopstick, the friend traps a tiny yellow bird so Little Leap Forward can study the bird's song. Then the drumbeat of Mao's Cultural Revolution explodes into a cacophony of destruction of anyone and anything associated with the "Four Olds" - customs, culture, habits and ideas. People considered counterrevolutionaries are rounded up by the Red Guards, schools are closed, books and artifacts are burned, and even kite-flying is banned. Yue and Farrow, who also collaborated on "Music, Food and Love," a memoir for adults, evoke how Little Leap Forward bears witness with the eye of a poet, the ear of a musician and the transformative imagi nation of a storyteller