A warm, engaging story of seven-year-old Kai Ting, set in the tough Panhandle District of San Francisco in the 1950s. Lee includes all of the classic fairy-tale conventions: a wicked stepmother; a totally obnoxious bully, Big Willie Mack, who lives to beat Kai into pulp; Toussaint La Rue, a street-wise paladin who befriends him; and the YMCA "Knights" who teach this David to stand up to his street Goliath. Kai's Merlin is his Uncle Shim, a Mandarin scholar who longs to pass on his classical learning to Most Able Student Kai, the only living son of his father's Shanghai family.
