The Bonesetter's Daughter - Softcover

Tan, Amy

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0804114986 ISBN 13: 9780804114981

Publisher: Ballantine Books, 2002

Synopsis

"The Bonesetter's Daughter dramatically chronicles the tortured, devoted relationship between LuLing Young and her daughter Ruth. . . . A strong novel, filled with idiosyncratic, sympathetic characters, haunting images, historical complexity, significant contemporary themes, and suspenseful mystery."
-Los Angeles Times

"TAN AT HER BEST . . . Rich and hauntingly forlorn . . . The writing is so exacting and unique in its detail."
-San Francisco Chronicle

"For Tan, the true keeper of memory is language, and so the novel is layered with stories that have been written down-by mothers for their daughters, passing along secrets that cannot be said out loud but must not be forgotten."
-The New York Times Book Review

"AMY TAN [HAS] DONE IT AGAIN. . . . The Bonesetter's Daughter tells a compelling tale of family relationships; it layers and stirs themes of secrets, ambiguous meanings, cultural complexity and self-identity; and it resonates with metaphor and symbol."
-The Denver Post

About this title

Review:

Amy Tan's fourth novel The Bonesetter's Daughter, like her highly successful The Joy Luck Club, explores the conflicts between a Chinese-American woman and her Chinese mother. Set in San Francisco, Ruth and her mother LuLing exercise a frosty commitment to each other. When her mother begins to show signs of Alzheimer's, and her talk of bad luck and curses becomes more jumbled, Ruth realises that her encroaching dependency will change her life. She questions how she will she care for a parent who she mostly resented throughout her childhood. The illness finally prompts Ruth to get her mother's autobiography translated and the central section of the book becomes LuLing's story of her mother, the bonesetter's daughter.

Tan excels at locating the small, quotidian details of Californian domesticity and works the fissures and rifts between the generations very well. She can also blend hip, pop psychology with inherited Chinese lore to amusing effect. But the narrative starts to hum with energy and drive as the story is told from LuLing's perspective. The story shifts to a small Chinese village known as Immortal Heart, in the thirties, where LuLing's mother learnt her father's skill with a splint and special dragon bones dug out of a cave called Monkey's Jaw. The quality of the writing takes on the charm and compulsion of a fable as Ruth's grandmother's tragic life unfolds. In turn, Ruth uses what she learns of the maternal line of resilience to retrieve her own writing voice and vision: "These are the women who shaped her life, who are in her bones...They taught her to worry...They wanted her to get rid of the curses." As she recognises what her mother wants to remember, she begins to define what she wants for her own life.--Cherry Smyth

Review:

"AS COMPELLING AS TAN'S FIRST BESTSELLER THE JOY LUCK CLUB. . . No one writes about mothers and daughters with more empathy than Amy Tan."
-The Philadelphia Inquirer

"[AN] ABSORBING TALE OF THE MOTHER-DAUGHTER BOND . . . THIS BOOK SING[S] WITH EMOTION AND INSIGHT."
-People

"POIGNANT AND BITTERSWEET . . . A STORY OF SECRETS AND REVELATION, ESTRANGEMENT AND RECONCILIATION."
-Rocky Mountain News

About this edition

• Publisher: Ballantine Books
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0804114986
• ISBN 13: 9780804114981
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• Number of pages: 416