When six-year-old Taotao is sent by her mother to live with her grandparents, her whole world seems to have fallen apart. Only in later years does she learn of her mother s secret pain - her own father s fall from grace in the Cultural Revolution - and come to understand the sacrifice she has made for her daughter. Startling Moon looks back to a past of rich but suppressed tradition, and forward to a very different China. Above all, it is the story of Taotao s quest to know her own heart: of the joys and responsibilites of friendship, the pain of first love, and the blossoming of a passion which will lead her to risk all that she holds dear....