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Review

This piece may NOT be freely reprinted. Please contact the author for re-print rights.

 

The Bonesetter's Daughter

by Amy Tan

List Price: $14.95
Buy this book from Amazon.com

This is Amy Tan’s fourth novel, and by far her strongest work. In “The Bone-setter’s Daughter”, Tan returns – as she has in all her novels – to her Chinese heritage and explores themes of despair, loss, belonging, and memory.


Ruth Young is a ghost writer for self-help books, living in California with her long-term partner and his two daughters. Her love-hate relationship with her ailing mother comes to a catalyst when LuLing is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. Ruth also finds amongst her mother’s possessions two collections of writings in Chinese – one packet titled “Things I Know Are True”, and the other titled “Things I Must Not Forget”.
 

As Ruth struggles to read and translate the writings, watching her mother deteriorate as she does so, she begins to piece together the true story of her mother’s life – and of her own.
 

Secrets and superstition emerge in a harrowing, heartbreaking fashion. As she did in “The Kitchen God’s Wife”, Tan explores the conflict between the horrors of the past and present reality and attempts to locate the threads that bind them.
 

Despite being a continuation of the same themes used in all Tan’s previous work, “The Bonesetter’s Daughter” manages to be both refreshing and memorable.
 


Sharanya Manivannan is a 19 year old writer, painter and Bharatnatyam dancer, as well as founder and executive producer of the CRESCENDO: Raise Your Voice series, which uses performance to raise funds for organisations supporting women in distress. But primarily, she is hardcore junkie, supporting a 100-books a year habit (the kind who, the odd teenage indiscretion aside, sneaked books into her parents' house in the bad old days before moving out). She can be reached at sharanya.manivannan@gmail.com 

 

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