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Summary: A story from the heart.
Review: I just heard Amy Tan speak at a conference this weekend, and I can't say enough about this articulate, funny and spiritual writer. In Bonesetter's Daughter, she dealves even deeper into her oftentimes troubled relationship with her mother and the overwhelming tragic influence of her Chinese past on her family. An important exploration into the women's experiences in China, it is also a study of human emotion and its heritage for future generations. Amy Tam began this book at her mother's exhortions to tell her "true story". In the aftermath of her experiences in the last moments of her mother's life, Amy Tam revised the whole focus. A true story of the heart.
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Summary: Mother and Daughter Relationship Analyzed Yet Again by Tan
Review: Amy Tan does it again by writing another tender novel about the hidden discoveries one can make about her own mother. This novel is one I highly recommend to those that find great strenghts within their own flesh and blood.
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Summary: Riveting multi-generational tale of loves found and lost
Review: I began this book with a favorable bias since I am a big fan of Amy Tan. However, only a quarter into the book, I was mesmerized by the use of language and the intricate tapestry of the tale that the gifted author wove. Anyone who has had to deal with the strains of an aging mother will immediately identify with the conflicts that Ruth feels as she is sandwiched between being a daughter and being her mother's caretaker. The author tells the tale in an entertaining manner yet with a steady pulse on the reader's emotions. The guilt and anxious of Ruth are skillfully drawn as an artist does with a blank canvas in selecting just the right patina of paint. The scenes are loving illustrated but there is not a trance of being mauldin. This story of ancient times is really a story of modern times. As in real life, this fictional tale documents that we are all influenced by family background and tensions. In the modern world, we no longer live with superstition and tradition as does LuLing and Precious Anne. Yet this is not the heart of the story. The heart is the familial squabbles tht erupt around every corner of life and this is what the modern reader most identifies with in this powerfully told tale.
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Summary: Generational and Cultural Divide
Review: In her latest novel, Amy Tan does what she does best: dissecting inter-familial relationships with precision and compassion. Rather than a rehash of an old storyline (as some reviewers have said), Ms. Tan steps into new territory in this book: the so-called "sandwich" generation, adults with grown children now dealing with care for ageing parents. Having recently read PAPER DAUGHTER: A MEMOIR by M. Elaine Mar, I found myself more aware of the huge generational differences between an American-raised daughter and a Chinese-raised mother. The old ways so ingrained in the mother, LuLing, circumscribe an entirely different way of life than that of her American-born daughter, Ruth, one where the loving mother criticizes her child as a way to show love. But in America, with new traditions, Ruth feels demeaned. Fortunately, a sense of the ancestral resonates in Ruth's heart when she attempts to journey through the landscape of the past via LuLing's writings. Ruth discovers her mother's essential spirit, gaining wisdom about the differences in their lives and cultures. This book also disabuses the reader of any romantic notions concerning rural Chinese life. Tan paints images of decay, death and ghosts, family tragedy and dreams. There are many ways to tell a story, and Amy Tan has mastered the multi-layered art of the Chinese and American. As she develops a tale more American than Chinese, she seems to be trying out other options in her range. For the most part she is successful. The only plot line I found superfluous was the "significant other" that Ruth lives with, as well as his teenaged children. None of these characters were more than props, not significant enough for me to care whether they were still around at the end. Amy Tan has proven herself to be more than a one book writer, and I'm sure she will continue to develop her craft and offer fans more well-wriiten novels.
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Summary: engrossing
Review: Beautiful engrossing even mysterious parallel stories about three generations of women. That they are Chinese and chinese-american is both incredibly important and irrelevant - they speak to all of us. I enjoyed the story of the daughter - the "ghost" writer as much as the less well known and understandable almost fantasy story of her mother and grandmother.
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Summary: Absolutely Loved It!!!
Review: In the tradition of Amy Tan novels, I thought this was great. It makes me want to go back and reread her others, Joy Luck Club, Secret Senses and Kitchen God's Wife.
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Summary: Alzheimer¿s Disease and Its Effects on Luling's Daughter
Review: Though many critics have grown weary of Amy Tan's exploration of the mother-daughter relationship, their assessment of her recent novel, The Bonesetter's Daughter, does not capture the paradigm behind LuLing's relationship with Ruth. Their relationship is strained, like all of Tan's novels, and the family's past is full of embedded secrets that only an archeologist can uncover. However, the novel also examines the effect of a detrimental disease on the relationship and Ruth's struggle to learn about her grandmother, her family name, and her mother's engrained superstitions. The only link she has to the past are a few trinkets and her mother's account of what happened in a language that (out of rebelliousness) Ruth never learned. This book not only expresses Ruth's frustration with her mother's oppressive parenting and superstitions, but it also deals with Ruth's guilt about how she treated her mother, and how she strives to take care of her when she learns of her disease -- A disease that will erase her mother's and her past. I highly recommend this poignant book to Tan readers and others alike. I think the critics have grossly underestimated its worth.
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Summary: A sensitive, emotion-driven tale by an excellent writer.
Review: In "The Bonesetter's Daughter," set in San Francisco and in North China, Amy Tan tells the story of Ruth Young and her mother, LuLing, in a story that reflects much of her own background. In the story, Ruth is a successful "book doctor," a ghostwriter who translates other people's thoughts into a coherent book--a skill at which she is adept. She is the "as told to" name below the author's, although the real creative effort is her own. Like Amy Tan herself, Ruth is in her forties, and the similarities do not stop there. While the book is not strictly autobiographical, there are a great many parallels between the author and Ruth. For example: both of their mothers were stricken with Altzheimers disease, and both had stormy relationships with their Chinese mothers, both of whom were suicidal. Ruth's mother, LuLing, came from China in the late 'forties, as did Amy Tan's mother. The story is told in three parts: first is Ruth's ten-year relationship with Art and his two daughters--teenagers in the story--with whom she lives; a relationship that is in trouble for reasons that Ruth cannot determine or resolve. Art seems to be a self-centered individual who takes advantage of Ruth's tendency to always place her own interests secondary. The second part of the story is LuLing's own story in China, which, fearing memory loss, she is writing, in Chinese calligraphy and which she eventually presents to her daughter. Ruth, because of their difficult relationship lets the manuscript gather dust for seven years, untranslated. LuLing's life story is a tale of tragedy and suffering, lost love and a tempestuous relationship with her own mother, Precious Auntie, which later--after her mother's death--haunts her. Finally, in the third section the focus is on Ruth and what she does with her new knowledge. The crux of the novel, however, is the second part: the story of LuLing in China, her turbulent relationship with her mother, and the war-torn environment of China in the 'forties. The story is about relationships, and the search by both LuLing and Ruth for their family's Chinese background, which is enveloped in mystery involving, among other things, the discovery, which actually took place in 1929-1937, of the bones of Homo-erectus, also known as Peking man, which were found in a cave at Zhoukoudian, near Peiping (now known as Beijing). Amy Tan has drawn on her own experiences to create her characters. In fact, in an interview with Nita Lelyveld, she says that her own mother was her muse. She could hear her mother's voice saying the things that LuLing said, and that she "did her best never to listen to her mother." In a parallel to Ruth's relationship with LuLing, and in turn, LuLing's with her mother, she says "my mother drove me crazy," This is a sensitive, emotion-driven story about mothers and daughters, told by an excellent writer who has lived the things she writes about. Amy Tan is a woman writing about women. A wonderful story. It held my interest to the end. Joseph Pierre
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Summary: I read it quickly
Review: Amy Tan's Joy Luck Club and The Kitchen's God Wife were inspirational and beautifully new...I understand that writers need to write from within their most known material, but I feel that Amy Tan has written enough books on the same material...and sometimes it feels like she is trying to come to terms with her own family mother-daughter relationship...cultural acceptance, etc. I am also the daughter of a mother who was born in a foreign country, and I was born in another foreign country...I understood the needs of Amy Tan to find some solace and some closure, but I feel that in as much as this last book was interesting, I felt somewhat bribed...I wish she would write about her own feelings, express her own emotions, and not cast them into these very estranged women...always the chinese mother has had such a horrible experience and therefore the grown daughter is not complete...It would be nice to see Amy change a little...I enjoyed the world of Auntie and China...but the American chinese Ruth was kind of boring and predictable...not as touching as her other stories, either...will be more careful in buying other books by her...
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Summary: Moving novel about intergenerational relationships.
Review: In "The Bonesetter's Daugher," Amy Tan explores the tortured relationship between a modern Chinese woman and her old-world mother. Ruth Young has a busy life, trying to cope with her demanding job, her live-in lover and her needy, elderly mother. Ruth and her mother, LuLing, love one another, but they are separated by a gulf of misunderstanding and by long-buried secrets. Only after LuLing's health deteriorates does Ruth have a manuscript translated that her mother had written for her years ago in Chinese. This manuscript reveals to Ruth how LuLing became the person she is today. Ruth learns that her mother is a woman of deep feeling and courage, who suffered much heartache and disappointment during her years as a young woman in China. "The Bonesetter's Daughter" has a lengthy flashback sequence that movingly depicts the details of LuLing's birth and her troubled early life. Unfortunately, the ending (which takes place in the present) lacks the impact of the flashback sequences, and the resolutions of the conflicts in the novel are a little too pat. However, I recommend this novel for Tan's deep understanding of what makes mothers and daughters love and hate each other, often at the same time.
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