"Historian Chang (Big Sister, Little Sister, Red Sister) parallels China's political upheavals with the evolution of her and her mother's relationship in this powerful memoir. Edifying, heartbreaking, and infuriating, this is tough to shake." - Publishers Weekly (starred review) "An essential, unexpectedly relevant account of a people divided and turned against themselves by politics." -- Kirkus Reviews (starred review) "An enthralling look into modern Chinese history and the impact on a family." -- Booklist "Chang's follow-up to her wildly popular 1991 memoir Wild Swans , which has sold some 15 million copies, delves further into her family's political history within the tumult of 20th-century China, her own 1978 escape to the West via higher education in London and the maternal ties that still bind her to the homeland she left nearly 50 years ago." -- The New York Times "In her bestselling 1991 memoir, Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China , Jung recounted the story of her family's life under the Communist regime, spanning a period through the late 1970s, when, at the age of 26, she left to study in Britain. Now she addresses the following decades, using her personal story to shed light on her ever-transforming, increasingly powerful homeland. Jung's first book is banned in China, where she's been unable to return, fearing imprisonment (she wrote a frankly unflattering biography of former leader Mao Zedong).

" -- AARP "This updated account is illuminating." -- The New York Times Book Review " Fly, Wild Swans is by far [Chang's] most painfully personal yet--an unflinching assessment of her life and career and the role those dearest to her played in both. It is equal parts memoir, journalist prose and history. It offers insights into elite Chinese politics, Communist history and the economic boom years of the 1980s and 1990s. It is also a book of enduring filial love. Its pages are suffused with love for her mother and for the myriad anonymous Chinese sources and academics who help Chang in researching her historical projects -- and suffered blowback as a result. Chang has a talent for tapping the history of the individual to speak to the broader societal forces at play around them. And in Chang's brave and patriotic mother, readers may also perceive a broader metaphor for China writ large, a country that has been smothered and surveilled by a resurgent party state under its top leader, Xi Jinping.

" -- NPR.org.