The Bonesetter’s Daughter

The same fascination with mother-daughter relationships that made Tan’s debut novel, The Joy Luck Club (1989), so captivating drives her newest, an even more polished and provocative work. Compulsively readable and beautifully structured around three richly metaphorical themes–bones, ghosts, and ink–this novel tells the stories of three generations of women, beginning at the turn of the twentieth century in a small Chinese village, where the bonesetter, a skilled healer, defies tradition and teaches his daughter everything he knows. Intelligent and willful, she vehemently rejects the marriage proposal of the vulgar coffinmaker, who curses her, thus setting in motion a tragic sequence of events that continues to unfold a century later in San Francisco, where a Chinese American woman finally reads the memoir her mother wrote for her. Although Ruth’s a ghostwriter for New Agey self-help books, the advice she formulates hasn’t helped her achieve genuine intimacy with her live-in boyfriend or cope with her argumentative mother, who has long been haunted by the ghost of a woman she calls Precious Auntie. Widowed since Ruth was a toddler, China-born and -raised calligraphy artist Luling still speaks stilted English in spite of decades of California life, and now she appears to be afflicted with Alzheimer’s. As Ruth moves back home to care for Luling, she is assailed by memories of her own difficult childhood, then discovers that Precious Auntie, the bonesetter’s daughter, is actually her grandmother. As Tan tells the spellbinding stories of these three strong, self-sacrificing women in this lucent novel of deep feelings and gentle humor, she weaves in stripes of vivid Chinese history, including the discovery of Peking Man, ponders what’s bred in the bone, and celebrates the preservation of family history as an act of love and a conduit for forgiveness.