The Bonesetter's Daughter: Summary and book reviews of The Bonesetter's Daughter by Amy Tan, plus links to an excerpt from The Bonesetter's Daughter and a biography of Amy Tan.
The Bonesetter's Daughter
by Amy Tan
Hardcover: Feb 2001,
200 pages.
Paperback: Jan 2002,
416 pages.
The first time Amy Tan - The New York Times best-selling author of The Joy Luck Club, The Kitchen God's Wife, and The Hundred Secret Senses - learned her mother's real name as well as that of her grandmother was on the day she died. It happened as Tan and several siblings - unified by a need to feel helpful instead of helpless - gathered to discuss their dying mother's past and prepare her obituary. Tan was stunned when she realized she had not known her own mother's birth name. It was just one of several surprises. In the act of writing a simple obituary Tan came to realize there was still so much she did not know about her. Soon afterwards she began rewriting the novel she had been working on for five years. Inspired by her own experiences with family secrets kept by one generation from the next, and drawn from a lifetime of questions and images, the result is The Bonesetters's Daughter.
The story begins when Ruth Young, a ghostwriter of self-help books, comes across a clipped stack of papers in the bottom of a desk drawer. Young has been caring for her ailing mother, LuLing, who is beginning to show the unmistakable signs of Alzheimer's disease. Written in Chinese by LuLing years earlier, when she first started worrying something was wrong with her memory, the papers contain a narrative of LuLing's life as a girl in China, and the life of her own mother, the daughter of the Famous Bonesetter from the village of Xian Xin - Immortal Heart - near the Mouth of the Mountain. Within the calligraphed pages Ruth finds the truth about a mother's heart, what she cannot tell her daughter yet hopes her daughter will never forget.
With her latest novel Amy Tan explores the changing place one has in a family of names that were nearly forgotten. Just as she herself has done, Tan shows Ruth finding the secrets and fragments of her mother's past - its heartfelt desires, its deepest wounds, its most profound hopes - and with each new discovery reconfiguring her assessment of the woman who shaped her life, who is in her bones.
The extent to which Tan's newest novel mixes pure fiction with elements of autobiography is made clear by Tan herself. In acknowledgements of The Bonesetter's Daughter she writes, "The heart of this story belongs to my grandmother, its voice to my mother."
Kirkus Reviews
The novel builds slowly, and a few sequences (including an overextended account of a visit to an assisted-living facility) seem inexplicably disproportionate. But the elaborate preparation pays generous dividends in the stunning final 50 or so pages a beautifully modulated amalgam of grief, pride, resentment, and resignation - as Ruth accepts the consequences of knowing she was her mother's child and mother to the child her mother had become. Tan strikes gold once again.
Publisher's Weekly
This luminous and gripping book demonstrates enhanced tenderness and wisdom, however; it carries the texture of real life and reflects the paradoxes historical events can produce.
Recent Reader Reviews
Rated of 5
by Sierra Marsh My thoughts about this book. I had to read this book for summer homework for Honors English 10 and I thought because a teacher picked the book that it was going to be boring and that I wouldn't like it but I do. It was a good book but if my grade for the first 4 weeks of... Read More
Rated of 5
by Laura ehh I truly despised this book. I predicted the ending before I even got through half of it. My prediction was correct! It just was NOT capturing my attention. At all.
Rated of 5
by Maya Saputra I'm in Love with Tan's Books!! Love at the first sight!!
I Love all Amy Tan's books! ^__^
Rated of 5
by Farah Nice book but it's not excellent! Amy Tan's a good writer. Actually I only read the book because I was assigned to, by school but I liked most of it. The characters and situations were very interesting and it takes maturity to appriciate most of the emotions displayed in this book.... Read More
Rated of 5
by Raul
Could it start any slower? Most of the rankings are from people who chose to read it, while i had to read it as an assignment. Unless you are an old woman this is a bad book.
Rated of 5
by Amy
Awesome book, really encaptures you in Chinese Culture and the way things were done back then. A truly amazing story.
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