The description of the novel says that the FL will become a stepmother with seven kids, none of them her own, but the widower that she marries has only three boys, ages 10 months old, three years, and five years old.

Three years later they will adopt two more, kids from the family of an imprisoned general. They will save two little boys from certain freezing death in winter.

Two or three years later, they will adopt two more boys, the orphaned sons of the ML's colleague who died in war.

So, the story is all about bringing up seven little boys during 10 years of cultural revolution, closed schools, and food rations and then their lives until 2017, as the FL and her husband help their kids bring up their seven grandkids.

The story is a fantasy of course, but the good thing is that it avoids the cliche of making millions during 1967-1977, making money in the black market, collecting antiques, etc. There is none of that. The only thing the FL does is to buy a pack of stamps from the 1960s which will sell for millions on our times, half a century later. The family truly lives and eats only using food stamps and veggies from their little garden. She sews clothes and shoes for all nine of them by hand for many years until her husband brings her a sewing machine which she, a fashion designer from the 2060s, does not know how to use, for her it's an antique!

There are no mutton jade skins or starry eyes with sword brows either, both spouses and their kids are normally looking people!!! The ML looks like the first PM of China, Zhou Enlai in his youth.

The relationship between the FL and the ML is there, but it is very Chinese, for lack of a better word. It starts as a marriage of convenience because she wants to hide during Cultural Revolution in the army base which was the safest haven back then and because his babies need a 24/7 nanny asap. They met, found each other suitable, and three days later were married! It's a very abrupt beginning for all of them, for sure.

The ML thinks he is marrying an illiterate peasant woman, darkly tanned, with poor taste in clothing, with callused hands, well past her prime (22 is old for a bride in Chinese village in 1960s). Certainly not a university graduate from France 100 years into the future, fully fluent in French and English, with top notch sewing and clothes and shoes designing skills, an accomplished businesswoman, and a chef of both Chinese and French cuisine, classic and modern. And she is great and creative both in bed and in politics!

He is a university graduate himself and a navy officer, a regiment commander, very smart and of course suspicious, because he immediately notices odd things in the FL's behavior and personality, so he suspects her to be a spy or something and does not touch her until many months later when she reveals her true identity to him which he accepts. What he struggled with for a long time is how modern she was, and how unbendingly child-free. She never agreed to have her own kids with him and she refused to carry all housework on her shoulders, etc.

They will have their own love story of course but the way it is described is rather off-putting. For nearly half of the novel all we read about is how they kick each other and bicker. In other words, the author simply does not describe their intimacy or happiness that much, or their lives outside their tiny house and house chores (careers, dates, fun, passion between sheets, etc.), it's in the backhround and in brief scattered mini-dialogues. The focus is on their kids and on what makes their kids grow up into decent men and on multiple difficult relatives and neighbours.

It's a well written and satisfying slice of life story of the first fifty years of that marriage of convenience, but it felt too long with the main characters sort of losing their status of being the driving force in that story as their kids grow up and become young men, and then middle aged uncles and then sixty-year olds themselves with the grown up kids.

So, it starts as (and is for the bulk of the narative) an exciting story about a young couple with kids in the 1960s China but ends as a story of two eighty-year olds in our time (not exciting at all, unfortunately, but at least both elderly spouses are still hale and hearty, thank Goodness the author did not kill them).