Snow Flower and the Secret Fan

The writing was beautiful, I loved the setting. The main character was equal parts inspiring and infuriating. Another reminder of the importance of communication with your loved ones. Incidentally, I'm not sure several weeks of devoted care is enough to erase decades of mistreatment and callousness. Even in the end, it felt like everything she did was to make herself feel better, and not to benefit Snow Flower.

This book is lovely. Simply lovely.

We follow Snow Flower and Lily, pledged in a lifelong laotong friendship from the early days of their foot binding. Through growing up, betrothal, marriage, children, love, war, and loss they share their lives and their secrets, until misunderstanding and pride tear them apart. It's a novel about friendship, but it's also so much more. It's a reflection from an old woman on her life and the decisions she has made along the way. Did I mention it is beautifully written? Because it is. And sad, and happy, and moving. Just like life.

I read this through the haze of sleep deprivation and baby blues that comes with the first two weeks of being a new mom. As such, I found the book both profoundly moving, and palpably, viscerally almost unbearably sad. See is very evocative -- I usually do very poorly with historical fiction, especially set in an era about which I had little a priori knowledge, but I found myself very invested in the characters.

A small group of old familars to start with. We were cringing at the descriptions of foot-binding, and remarking on how well the book had shown us a window into a time and place completely foreign to us, but a fresh face came running in, apologizing profusely for being late. She grew up in a village in Taiwan, and for her, the book brought back vivid memories of her childhood. (And she was astonished to learn that See doesn't speak Chinese.)

We rambled on about relationships between women (in-laws in particular), the advantages and disadvantages for arranged marriages vs marrying for love...