My local library has us go around in a circle and sum up the book in one word (Or a few words, I mean, they aren’t strict about it and sometimes one word just won’t do!) and my word for this one was “unrelenting” because I found it to be one of the toughest reads I’ve gone through in a while. That’s not to say it isn’t a good book, it is but, it’s about being a woman in China in the 1400s so there is the constant weight of oppression that I found frustrating to bear and difficult to open back up.
Come for the foot-binding. Stay for even more foot-binding! (As a person who loves walking and running it makes me absolutely sick to think of this practice and it features heavily in the story.) Even now, thinking about the foot binding has me clenching my jaw. There is a scene where a young girl tells her even younger sister, who is having her first binding at the age of 7, “Mother does this because she loves us.” FEMININE RAAAAAAGE.
Okay. I will get off my foot-binding soapbox to tell you what’s good about this book, because there is a lot. First and most importantly, it is based on the real story of a female doctor in the 1400s, Tan Yunxian, who bucked social conventions to treat women, under the tutelage of her grandmother, another doctor to women. The author based the novel on the actual book Tan Yunxian published when she was in her 50s, detailing her patients and treatments. I appreciate and am in awe that it was based on a real person, and am glad the story has been told, but that doesn’t make it any easier to read as it’s basically a never-ending train of bad news for the main character. She was married off at the age of 15 to a career-climbing and largely absent husband and basically under house arrest under the strict and watchful eye of her mother-in-law. As those in my book club pointed out, it was still a story of hope as she managed to help others despite all the obstacles in her way.
One more thing about the novel, See employs some pretty dramatic time jumps between the four sections of the novel which mirror the four stages of a woman’s life: milk days (childhood), hair pinning days (marriageable), rice and salt days (marriage/motherhood), sitting quietly (old age). (Also, I have to point out that this mirrors the ages in Hollywood as stated by Goldie Hawn in First Wives Club. “There are four ages in Hollywood, Babe, District Attorney, and Driving Miss Daisy. But I digress).
All of a sudden the next section was “and now it’s 12 years later.” Wait, what? She only did this a few times, but I didn’t like how abrupt it was.
The title had me thinking it was going to be more of a uplifting, but it was plodding ad slow. Sort of like with how people have to walk after the foot binding process. For the rest of their lives. (I cannot let it go). All in all, this was a good book about an important topic and one I’ll recommend with a bit of a content warning.