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The Bonesetter's Daughter: A Novel (Ballantine Reader's Circle) | 
 enlarge | Author: Amy Tan
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Category: Book
List Price: $14.95
Buy Used: $0.33
You Save: $14.62 (98%)
New (38) Used (89) Collectible (7) from $0.33
Avg. Customer Rating:  308 reviews
Sales Rank: 12498
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 400
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.7
Dimensions (in): 8.1 x 5.5 x 0.9
ISBN: 0345457374
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780345457370
ASIN: 0345457374
Publication Date: February 4, 2003
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Amazon.com Review
At the beginning of Amy Tan's fourth novel, two packets of papers written in Chinese calligraphy fall into the hands of Ruth Young. One bundle is titled Things I Know Are True and the other, Things I Must Not Forget. The author? That would be the protagonist's mother, LuLing, who has been diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. In these documents the elderly matriarch, born in China in 1916, has set down a record of her birth and family history, determined to keep the facts from vanishing as her mind deteriorates. 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. Nor is rural isolation the worst of it. LuLing's family, a clan of ink makers, believes itself cursed by its connection to a local doctor, who cooks up his potions and remedies from human bones. And indeed, a great deal of bad luck befalls the narrator and her sister GaoLing before they can finally engineer their escape from China. Along the way, familial squabbles erupt around every corner, particularly among mothers, daughters, and sisters. And as she did in her earlier The Joy Luck Club, Amy Tan uses these conflicts to explore the intricate dynamic that exists between first-generation Americans and their immigrant elders. --Victoria Jenkins
Product Description
““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
Ruth Young and her widowed mother, LuLing, have always had a tumultuous relationship. Now, before she succumbs to forgetfulness, LuLing gives Ruth some of her writings, which reveal a side of LuLing that Ruth has never known. . . .
In a remote mountain village where ghosts and tradition rule, LuLing grows up in the care of her mute Precious Auntie as the family endures a curse laid upon a relative known as the bonesetter. When headstrong LuLing rejects the marriage proposal of the coffinmaker, a shocking series of events are set in motion–all of which lead back to Ruth and LuLing in modern San Francisco. The truth that Ruth learns from her mother’s past will forever change her perception of family, love, and forgiveness.
“A strong novel, filled with idiosyncratic, sympathetic characters; haunting images; historical complexity; significant contemporary themes; and suspenseful mystery.”
–Los Angeles Times
“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
“Tan at her best . . . rich and hauntingly forlorn . . . The writing is so exacting and unique in its detail.”
–San Francisco Chronicle
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| Customer Reviews: Read 303 more reviews...
 A Favorite - Reread; Great Audio Book November 21, 2008
I will rarely reread a book because there are just so many other books out there that I really want to read. One book I really enjoyed in 2001 when I read it was Amy Tans: The Bonesetter's Daughter, and, since I needed a good audio book for a short trip, I decided to try this story one more time. I was not disappointed. The author and actress Joan Chen were co narrators of this audio book, and they did a flawless job alternating between the Chinese and American accents.
The Bonesetter's Daughter is a story about a mother and a daughter raised different cultures. Ruth is an American born Chinese woman, and her mother Luling was born and raised in China.
Ruth Young is a 40-something ghostwriter in San Francisco who periodically goes mute, a metaphorical indication of her inability to express her true feelings to the man she lives with, Art Kamen, a divorced father of two teenage daughters. Ruth's inability to talk is subtly echoed in the story of her mother LuLing's early life in China.
LuLing has always been a burden to Ruth, overbearing, accusatory, darkly pessimistic. Now, at 77, she has Alzheimer's, but she had recorded in a diary the extraordinary events of her childhood and youth in a small village in China during the years that included the discovery nearby of the bones of Peking Man, the Japanese invasion, the birth of the Republic and the rise of Communism. LuLing was raised by a nursemaid called Precious Auntie, the daughter of a famous bonesetter.
Answers to both womens' problems are revealed as the reader hears Luling's touching story of growing up in an orphanage.
One of my favorite passages:
These are the things I know are true:
My name is LuLing Liu Young. The names of my husbands were
Pan Kai Jing and Edwin Young, both of them dead and our secrets
gone with them. My daughter is Ruth Luyi Young. She was born in a
Water Dragon Year and I in a Fire Dragon Year. So we are the same
but for opposite reasons.
This was just a beautiful story, which demonstrates how we really are a product of the environment in which we were raised; how the past affects our future. I was especially touched by the mother/daughter relationship, as Ruth became involved in the care of her aging mother.
Mother/daugher generational must read August 9, 2008
This book is a phenomenal read for anyone who is interested in generational changes. The book is well written and a glorious display of a woman's journey linked to a difficult generational past. If you have trouble understanding your mother, read this book. Excellent story telling and deep visual images.
Classic Tan July 24, 2008
I just finished reading The Bonesetter's Daughter, by Amy Tan, and it's fabulous.
The novel begins with Ruth Young, a middle-aged ghostwriter living in modern-day California. Ruth is living with her lover, Art, and feeling out of sorts with herself. Her mother, LuLing, is a first-generation Chinese immigrant with a failing memory. Worried about her mother, Ruth moves in with her to ensure that she's eating, resting, and taking her medication as she should.
It's then that Ruth recalls a sheaf of papers that her mother gave her many years before, written in Chinese. Ruth's Chinese is doubtable, so she'd never taken the time to translate her mother's writings. Suddenly overwhelmed with her mother's fragility, she pays a scholar to translate the text. What follows is the story of LuLing's life before she came to America, and it is a fascinating tale.
LuLing divulges that she was a bastard child, not actually the sister of the woman Ruth calls Aunt Gal. She was previously married, she taught at an orphanage, and she has been keeping certain secrets about herself and her life for nearly fifty years. Learning about who her mother is helps Ruth understand her own identity and appreciate her family history.
The story of LuLing's life is rich and detailed. I loved Tan's descriptive writing about life in China and LuLing's relationship with her mother. I also enjoyed the myriad parallels that Tan drew between Ruth and LuLing, similarities that Ruth herself did not know existed until she read the manuscript.
Worth reading.
Into the Orient, across generations. June 10, 2008
This story seamlessly meshes past and present--three generation's worth--into a beautiful, nearly flawless, piece of work. Tan connects the past and present through a manuscript written by her main character's mother. Whole chapters are devoted to her mother's childhood and young adult memories, as are entire chapters devoted to the main character's childhood and present-day adult life. I am amazed that while reading this generation-spanning novel, never did I lose track of the novel's setting or time.
Amy Tan's novel provokes empathy, joy, sorrow, laughter, and a host of other emotions. This is her novel's strength.
A Stunning Read April 7, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
The Bonesetter's Daughter is, essentially, about how the past affects the future. Some other major themes are the relationships between mothers and daughters and the culture gap between Chinese immigrants and their children.
In the first half of the book (the "present"), Ruth's mother is suffering from Alzheimer's disease. Ruth often recalls significant moments in her childhood that illustrate her relationship with her mother. When Ruth finds a written account of her mother's past (written by her mother) in her drawer, a number of perplexing things about her mother become clear. The second part of the book is the written account of Ruth's mother's life that helps Ruth to understand why her mother is the woman she is.
I thought this was an incredibly insightful look at how the past affects the future and of how the experiences of one's ancestors can affect one's own life. The plot of the story drew me in, and Amy Tan's writing style kept me reading until the end. I was also deeply moved by the ending scenes and would highly recommend this book to anyone interested, especially fans of Amy Tan's books already.
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