The Bonesetter's Daughter
by Amy Tan

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• ISBN13: 9780804114981
• Condition: New
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Book Reviews of The Bonesetter's Daughter

Book Review: The Bonesetter's Daughter
Summary: 5 Stars

The Bonesetter's Daughter takes place alternately in present day San Francisco and in 1920s China, where Luling struggles through a life cluttered with bad luck. With her Americanized daughter, Ruth, in northern California, Luling still feels stifled and afraid by the bad luck she is certain plagues them. Even as an adult, Ruth feels the weight of her mother's worries and guilt-ridden lessons. When Ruth learns that Luling has Alzheimer's disease, she realizes that she must come to terms with her feelings for and about her mother. But first she must learn the truth about her mother's earlier life in China.

This is a heartrending novel for mothers of daughters or daughters of mothers. How many of us have had to learn that when our mothers are criticizing us they are really loving us? How many of us have yearned to know the truth of our mothers' past, who they were before we were in the world? There are many universal truths displayed throughout Tan's fiction. Her novels show that though daughters do not wish to repeat the patterns set by their mothers, they are almost certainly destined to, that is, unless they make the conscious decision to release the pain and longing. As daughters we inherit our mother's weaknesses, but as adults we can reappropriate weakness into strength.

A longtime fan of Tan's, I was thrilled reading The Bonesetter's Daughter and could not put it down. Universal, honest, achingly true, Tan's straightforward prose speaks to the strengths and the weaknesses of the timeless bond between mothers and daughters.

Summary of The Bonesetter's Daughter

A San Francisco career woman who makes her living by ghostwriting self-help books, Ruth has little idea of her mother's past or true identity. What's more, their relationship has tended to be an angry one. Still, Ruth recognizes the onset of LuLing's decline--along with her own remorse over past rancor--and hires a translator to decipher the packets. She also resolves to "ask her mother to tell her about her life. For once, she would ask. She would listen. She would sit down and not be in a hurry or have anything else to do."

Framed at either end by Ruth's chapters, the central portion of The Bonesetter's Daughter takes place in China in the remote, mountainous region where anthropologists discovered Peking Man in the 1920s. Here superstition and tradition rule over a succession of tiny villages. And here LuLing grows up under the watchful eye of her hideously scarred nursemaid, Precious Auntie. As she makes clear, it's not an enviable setting:

I noticed the ripe stench of a pig pasture, the pockmarked land dug up by dragon-bone dream-seekers, the holes in the walls, the mud by the wells, the dustiness of the unpaved roads. I saw how all the women we passed, young and old, had the same bland face, sleepy eyes that were mirrors of their sleepy minds.

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