Rating: 
Summary: Excellent, Highly Recommend
Review: This book was, in every sense of the word, a page turner. I loved how easily Dai is able to lure the reader into the foreign world of the two boys destined for re-education. Although I read this book months ago it has stuck with me. I can still remember, in detail, the vivid scenes from the mountains, farm, and mines. As I neared the final pages I kept wishing for more of the story to magically appear... I hope this book will continue to stick with me for many months more. The writing is exquisite as is the construction of plot and characters. It reads as though a gifted story teller is sitting before you recollecting a memory of their past. The best part of this book is not that it is just a captivating story but that it is also one of those few treasured books that change one's thinking and outlook. It is the sort of book that influences one's personality and infects the spirit. In a word, wonderful.
Rating:
Summary: The lovely Chinese Seamstress
Review: I loved this book. It was very entertaining and gave me another glimpse into what it must have been like during the Cultural Revolution/Re-Education period of China's history. Very incredible devastating time under a dictator that all Americans should now about but many don't know anything about. I would suggest if you like this book then to try Wild Swans - which is one of the better books I have read.
Rating: 
Summary: Detailingly simplified...
Review: Work of simple art with a 'walk you through the story' line. Gave a quick look in to the lives of the re-education of two 'so-called intellectuals' during China's cultural revolution. Good story telling with no grand climatic developments. Enjoyed this noteworthy quick read.
Rating:
Summary: Thought invoking
Review: This book was different and new. I like exploring new topics and this was a great one. I like that they are willing to risk everything to read a book and experience the adventure.
Rating:
Summary: The human mind and spirit resist being stifled.
Review: Numerous accounts of abuse and degradation have been chronicled by those having lived through the Chinese Cultural Revolution. "Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress" is unique in that the chronicling of the unnamed protagonist's tale takes place in a setting where the education wasn't conducted on a mass scale.The two young college students, clever and daring in ways true of younger people, are assigned to a remote mountain village. That is their punishment for being the offspring of China's professional class. And it is there that they are expected to perform drudgery that will expunge their elitist ways. From the local village chieftain the young men cleverly find methods to acquire bits of freedom. By becoming an entertaining and engrossing storyteller, the novel's protagonist is allowed to travel treacherous mountain passes to a nearby village where silent films are shown. Sometimes sitting behind the screen and viewing everything backwards, the viewer captures enough of the action and storyline to return and execute his assignment, that of relating the films' stories to the village to which he's confined. His homebase's dwellers, all illiterate, sit and listen with rapt attention as the silent film's content is related with great animation. Secondhand entertainment takes on a life of its own. So proficient is the storyteller that his freedoms expand, allowing him to visit "the Little Chinese Seamstress" with whom he's become enamored. The core theme of the story is the critical importance of personal, mental and intellectual freedoms. When the two young men discover a stash of forbidden books owned by one of their acquaintances who is also being re-educated, their goal becomes to surreptitiously read as many of them as possible without the owner's knowledge. Further the protagonist also feels it is his duty to educate the "Little Chinese Seamstress" about the emancipated thinking found in a volume of Balzac both young men so treasure. They succeed in a manner the reader wouldn't expect!
Rating:
Summary: a reader's delight!
Review: The story takes place during the cultural revolution during the ruling of Mao Zedong, but is by no means, a sad or pitiful story! The accounts are inspirational, vivid with colors, life and love! This is an amazing, wonderful story of youth, love, and love of books! This book made me cherish my freedoms and ability to read whatever I choose! The tale has a subtle irony to it. You could easily miss the point of the story. The tale does not have the feel of a fully encapsulated story, but is more of a window of view into the lives of the characters. The book is very poetic, innocent and smart! I think readers of all ages will enjoy the humor and the essence of life, that this book exudes! The only down fall is that the book left me longing for more; explanations, or time with the characters. Some of the book's motifs were not clearly explained. But this is still a wonderful gem! Less than 200 pages, and a best seller in the San Francisco Bay Area! ~Enjoy!
Rating: 
Summary: Nice little book.
Review: This is a very quick easy read about two friends who have been sent to the countryside for re-education during China's Cultural Revolution. It's a nice little book with sparse storytelling - but it won't bowl you over. There is too little character development and not enough substance. The ending, too, is very different. However, it is a sweet little story which I did enjoy.
Rating:
Summary: More subtle than it seems
Review: Lovely book. Except for two brief shifts in narrative viewpoint, the story is told in a very simple, almost naive way. But that simplicity hides great richness. The story is about the power of dreams, imagination, fables, and the dangers they bring. The Cultural Revolution had forced two teenagers, the narrator and his friend, to relocate to a tiny mountainside village. And though these two young men are hardly shining lamps of erudition and culture, they manage to excite the imagination of their neighbors. Their violin (poorly played) charms the headmaster into accepting them into the village. The headmaster becomes enthralled, almost hypnotized with a clock with a rooster on the face, and its hold over him helps the two boys cope with farmwork. When the headmaster discovers the two can retell movies skillfully, they are sent to the larger village down th mountain expressly to watch films and retell them when they return. These things help them endure the rigors of Mao's reeducation. The story creates for them a kind of tiny paradise. When they find (steal) a chest full of forbidden western classics, they are ecstatic. The stories are themselves dangerous, in Mao's paranoid, anti-intellectual, anti-western culture, where everyone was an informer and the crimes were not defined. But the stories are also dangerous for their exploration of the passions, for their power to excite the imagination, for their sheer craft and knowledge of the human heart. The narrator's friend begins to use Balzac's stories to woo a lovely seamstress. In the very briefest, most evocative possible way, Dai shows how the books bring hints of conflict and danger into this little village. The narrator finds he is jealous of his friend and the seamstress. More disturbingly, he finds he thinks of things as his and mine, where before he never thought to distinguish. Contrary to another reviewer, I find the story doesn't patronize or belittle the seamstress at all. In fact, that is one of the key ironies of the book, that the boy had tried to win her heart, and then make her a sophisticate, with Balzac, and had in fact succeeded. But the stories are the very thing that drive her away to make her own life in the city. They freed her, in fact. Contrary to a reviewer below, the story feels Chinese to me. It has that exuberant, slightly coarse humor and that feeling of localness, like everything is taking place in a minature landscape: mountain, fields, a town (the big one) that consists of two buildings. Dai himself endured "re-education," and it must have been a horrific experience. That he can write such a sunny, yet subtle and resonant work about the period is another proof of the power of literature and the imagination.
Rating:
Summary: Brilliant and perfect
Review: I really, really enjoyed Dai Sijie's novel. It was very French, which wasn't bad, but the ending is not what an American might expect. Still, it is a brilliant portrait of a reeducation camp during Mao's China, and has excellently developed characters. This book's plot revolves around a three boys exiled to a Chinese reeducation camp, for being 'intellectuals'. They have precious little to amuse them in the spare surroundings, and their days are filled with forced labor. When two of the boys, who are fast friends, find a stash of Western novels, their lives are changed. They read Balzac and other classic writers with zeal. Their perspecives widen, and they begin to clumsily find love. Balzac and the LCS transports the reader entirely to another world. It is a brilliant book.
Rating:
Summary: Didn't love it; didn't hate it
Review: This is one of those books that left me at the end thinking, "That's it?" I won't say it was a waste of my time, however. I found the descriptions, while often grotesque, to be very vivid. They placed me at the scene of the events. I didn't care much about the characters, though. I really didn't feel like I knew them at all. As I said in the title, I didn't love it, but I didn't hate it either.
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