Bound

Rating:
Summary: A rich story blending fairy tale themes & historical detail
Review: Donna Jo Napoli's well-written, elaborate retellings of classic stories have reinvented those fairy tales for new, more sophisticated audiences. With her new novel, BOUND, Napoli continues her tradition by placing the Cinderella story in a specific time and place: the seventeenth-century Ming Dynasty in northern China. By doing so, Napoli is able to combine actual history with fairy tale elements to create a rich and emotionally complex novel.

After Xing Xing's beloved father dies, she is left to the custody of his second wife, her cruel stepmother. Stepmother has just one goal: to help her only daughter Wei Ping marry well. Although Wei Ping is already fifteen years old, Stepmother decides to bind her feet, a process that was usually begun in early childhood. Stepmother is convinced that this horrific process, which her late husband frowned upon, will make Wei Ping more attractive to potential suitors. Instead, it gives the girl debilitating pain and a life-threatening infection.

While her stepsister heals, Xing Xing becomes the family servant, dressed in rags and only secretly practicing the "three perfections" --- painting, poetry, and calligraphy --- which her father had valued and helped cultivate in her. Xing Xing loves to learn, but adults in her society discourage it, saying that "lack of talent in a woman is a virtue." As Xing Xing attempts to practice her art and evade her evil Stepmother, she finds solace from an unexpected source --- a giant fish who may be the spirit of her late mother.

Napoli's story bears a general resemblance both to traditional Western Cinderella stories and to the much older Chinese Cinderella tales. By placing her story in a specific time and place, Napoli also introduces historical details and themes about the value of women, which add depth to the tale. All the familiar elements are here: the cruel stepmother, the stepsister (who here is not really evil, just needy), the fancy dress, the lost shoe, and the prince. What may be surprising is why Xing Xing seeks to marry the prince --- rather than romance, prestige, or the love of fine things, Xing Xing seeks a royal marriage because it may be her only chance to grow into a strong, accomplished, and independent woman.

--- Reviewed by Norah Piehl

Rating:
Summary: Bound to a life of service
Review: Fourteen-year-old Xing Xing lives in ancient China and her life is literally "bound". Bound by the old traditions of China where she must become the servant of her stepmother after her father's death. Bound by the injustice and ill treatment of women. Bound to remain a servant the rest of her life and be neglected by society. Bound to never find a husband because she has no parents to arrange her a suitable marriage. Xing Xing spends her days being a slave girl to her half-sister Wei Ping who is also bound, but in a different way. Wei Ping has her feet cruelly bound to make them small, a tradition in China, that symbolizes wealth and elegantness, a painful compulsory act if a girl is going to marry into the high society. Xing Xing however does not complain about her role in the family and secretly feeds her passion of and gift of poetry and calligraphy. She secretly dreams of a different life of freedom, a life that seems so far away, that is until the village has its annual festival, a big celebration in which Xing Xing's stepmother hopes to find a husband for Wei Ping. Things are going to change however and greed in the end might threaten all that Xing Xing has built up for herself.

I am a Chinese-American and I really did feel this book lived up to my expectations and the Chinese Cinderella myth that is was based on. Life in Ancient China was not easy for women and the bound feet was something that my great-great-grandma had to go through too and it was a terrible experience for her. I have become a fan of Donna Jo Napoli after her book Daughter of Venice and Bound lived up to everything I'd hoped for. A definite recommendation!

Rating:
Summary: Excellent book!
Review: I was VERY excited to see that a new book had come out by Donna Jo Napoli. I love many of her books. My favorite is Zel, and Sirena is also very good. Bound is a very excellent book and I am very pleased with it, especially because it was better than Beast, which i personally thought could have been a bit better.
Bound is based on the Chinese version of Cinderella. I loved how it was filled with details about life in ancient China, and it was very interesting to learn more about the tradition of girls having their feet bound to make them smaller. The only small complaint I have with this book is that the end seems a bit rushed, but I really loved how the whole book was filled with Xing Xing's daily life. I especially was fascinated with Xing Xing's crazy stepmother. The book IS expensive, but i suggest you buy it!

Rating:
Summary: Cinderella unbound
Review: This is not your familiar, comfortable Cinderella story. There are no magic wands or pumpkin coaches, and happily ever after happens only in, well, fairy tales. Real life offers few of these sugar spun fantasies, particularly for three unsupported women in a Ming dynasty Chinese village. Fourteen year old Xing Xing, her stepmother, and her half-sister Wei Ping are each bound: socially, ideologically, and financially. The physical, crippling binding of Wei Ping's feet is a metaphor for an encompassing system of patriarchal privilege. But in another sense of the word, to be bound is also to be heading towards something-- not so much a fate, as a rare and precious choice of fates.

That freedom of choice is the greatest of presents from Xing Xing's dead mother. She may (or may not) be incarnated as a giant white and red carp, in a pond near the potter's cave in which the three women continue to live with increasing poverty after the death of Xing Xing's father. The orphaned Xing Xing lives on her stepmother's charity, such as it is, as a virtual slave. Life isn't all bad, of course. Xing Xing finds joy in writing calligraphy and poetry into the sky, in visiting the beautiful carp, in the beauty of a painted pottery shard, and in the green dress and very special pair of slippers her mother secretly left behind for her.

These four women-- Xing Xing, her dead mother, Stepmother, and Wei Ping-- and their relationships to each other are at the heart of the story. Napoli redraws Stepmother as an understandable, if not likable, figure who behaves as she does for very good reasons: ideology, jealousy, and an anxiety for Wei Ping's and her own wellbeing, for which she is willing to sacrifice Xing Xing's. The psychological undercurrents, particularly the hint of tensions between Stepmother and Xing Xing's mother when they were both alive as the potter's two wives, drive and fill in the frame of the story. No effort is made to make a traditional villain into a heroine, as with Napoli's earlier retelling of Hansel and Gretel (The Magic Circle), but Stepmother is a fully realized and complex character.

Other characters are less well drawn than Stepmother. Xing Xing is a little bland in comparison, though her conflicting desires to conform to social norms for women and to find her own voice make her a likable heroine who, though forward thinking, is not jarringly anachronistic. The prince is appealing, but he appears only briefly and rather belatedly. Despite (or because of) this, Napoli pens a conclusion as convincingly real as it is satisfying.

It doesn't all work perfectly. The magic is incorporated with subtle ambiguity in the figure of the carp, but it seems to be almost a cop out to have a blatantly magical slipper that is too small for bound feet (only when belonging to the wrong people) but fits unbound ones (belonging to the right person). The details of historical setting can also be rather awkwardly introduced, like when Stepmother mentions the "jiang hu lang zhong," immediately adding, "a barefoot wandering doctor." Overall, however, Cinderella fits in so well with a Chinese setting-- unsurprising, given that the oldest recorded versions of the tale are Chinese-- that it seems odd that Cinderella isn't set there more often.

Napoli rewrites a tale that traditionally takes place, once upon a time, in a kingdom far away, with an unflinching honesty that comes with its own brand of wisdom, logic, and magic. Bound is no longer quite a romance, in either form or content, but it is a deeply thoughtful retelling that reads as though a slipper were finally returning to its proper owner; that this was the way it really happened.