Parent reviews for When the Sea Turned to Silver

Love these books! My 7 and 8 year old daughters wouldn't allow me to put this book down, and even their four year old brother enjoyed listening. We've enjoyed the stories within the stories, and piecing it all together. We would hypothesize how and who and why. It was so fun! Highly recommend for family read aloud! Also, Where the Mountain Meets the Moon and Starry River of the Sky are companion books that all follow different generations of the same family.

When the Sea turned to Silver is the third in a wonderful trilogy by Grace Lin. These books are magically told, lavishly illustrated and poetically rich. Lovely analogies, rich language characterization, personal development of the characters as they undergo internal and external journeys, and strong implicit messages about family love and respect and individual integrity versus lust for power or riches suffuse the books. Elinor, my daughter, who discovered these at 6 and read them all by herself, loves these books and begged for the second and the third after completing the first. The hardbacks are particularly beautiful and well worth the difference in price but the illustrations also translate well in the paperbacks. Although Elinor is now between 6 and 7, these books are equally appropriate for any child up to 13 or so and even I love reading them. It is too soon to tell but I can imagine these becoming classics and revisited at different ages once on the shelf.