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Summer Reading 2026

Summer is here! At Bookreporter.com, this means it's time for us to share some great summer book picks with our Summer Reading Contests and Feature.

We are hosting a series of 24-hour contests for these titles on select days through mid-August, so you will have to check the site each day to see the featured prize book and enter to win.

Daughters of the Sun and Moon by Lisa See

June 2026

Lisa See is well known and respected for her fiction that includes a little-known story of historical significance, as well as one of female friendship. DAUGHTERS OF THE SUN AND MOON brilliantly does just that.

The novel is set in Los Angeles when it was a dusty pueblo town in 1855. The idea for the book came to Lisa over 30 years ago as she was doing research for her nonfiction work, ON GOLD MOUNTAIN. She saw details about the Night of Horrors, which occurred on October 24, 1871. An angry mob of roughly 500 white and Latino people attacked the city's Chinese quarter, murdering 19 Chinese men and boys.

The story stayed with Lisa, and around it she constructed a narrative based on four women who were known to have lived during that time, making one into a composite character.

Lisa See, author of Daughters of the Sun and Moon

In 1870, three Chinese women arrive in the small, dusty and violent pueblo of Los Angeles. Dove, the bound-footed daughter of an imperial scholar, is entrancing and innocent. These characteristics should bring her great rewards, beginning with her arranged marriage to a much older merchant. Petal, the big-footed daughter of peasants, has grown up hungry. In a moment of desperation, Petal’s father sells her to buy money for rice seed, and she is loaded onto a ship to the Gold Mountain --- America --- where she is once again sold. Moon is married to a doctor of traditional Chinese medicine, but her failed footbinding as a child has left her with a limp that lessens her value in the eyes of many. Anti-Chinese sentiment is strong in Los Angeles, and this eventually leads to the Night of Horrors during which all three women are challenged in ways they could not have imagined.

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