AmyTan As Chronicler Of a Complex Mother-Daughter Relationship

How would you feel if you had to wait until your mother's death to unearth her true name? Amy Tan and her siblings found themselves in this predicament when they were filling her death certificate. They did not know which name to put down. This is one of the astonishing revelations that her new novel, The Bonesetter's Daughter, shows. If you remember its author well, she is the acclaimed author of "The Joy Luck Club," The Kitchen God's Wife, The Moon Lady, The Chinese Siamese Cat, The Hundred Secret Senses etc. She is one of the most recognized Chinese American authors. So far, until this last novel, her late mother, Daisy Tan, had been the source of her stories.

How does this book get started?: Some of the plot elements in The Bonesetter's Daughter

As you go through the pages of this interesting, but quite complex novel, you will uncover elements such as family, loyalty, love, memory, purging, victory and defeat, confession, sickness and death. But, more importantly after going through the first few chapters, you will get involved in the story of Ruth Young. The Bonesetter's Daughter begins with pages where Luling remembers when she was a little girl in the village called Immortal Heart. She talks about her childhood with her nursemaid, Precious Auntie. The latter's face was scarred by burns that made her mute. As you continue reading, you will find Ruth Young's struggle to make sense of her confused life. As a modern, stressed-out ghostwriter of self-help books, she finds a pile of calligraphied papers in a desk drawer that was written in Chinese by her mother, Luling. Since her mother has Alzheimer's, she can't rely on her for the translation. So she assumes the responsibility of translating the papers which happened to contain the stories of her mother's and grandmother's lives in China. The title for the book stems from the idea that Luling's mother was the daughter of the famous Bonesetter from Xian Xin in China. To tell you the least about the novel, the book becomes the translated pages.

What can you get out of this novel?

This book is the recreation of Luling's story in China, the Japanese Invasion and WWII. More than that, it's also a revelation of family secrets (Amy did not have an easy relationship with her mother. They struggled a lot), superstitions, proverbs, suffering, and details about her mother's battle with the disease that ended up killing her.

If you want to read a good, go ahead and purchase this book from your nearest bookstore. You can buy it online too.