Bonesetter's Daughter by Amy Tan

I got Amy Tan's Bonesetter's Daughter for my iPod for the Christmas trip, for all those hours in the plane when I was going to be too tired to read but too awake to sleep (audiobooks are the best thing for this - and Joan Chen is a wonderful narrator for this book). Only later my mom reminded me that I actually own the book already, but had lent it to my mom and then forgotten about it... Never mind, it's a good book anyway.

Amy Tan writes pretty much about one thing - difficult relationships between Chinese mother and her American-born daughter, and that's what Bonesetter's Daughter is about too. Her writing is very formulaic, but she writes very well and her books are always interesting, so it doesn't really matter. This story is about Ruth and her difficult Chinese mother LuLing who has been diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease, and how the daughter finds her mother's memoirs and learns to know her mother in a different light.

This might be my favourite of Amy Tan's books, but I think that it affects me especially well at this point in my life instead of few years back. Ruth's desperation with her strange mother, with LuLing losing herself in her illness and Ruth's struggle to understand her mother are all so beautifully and touchingly described. The story opens up layer by layer as we learn about the person LuLing has been, and so much more heartbreaking it is to see what she has become. Tan also writes very touchingly about the gap between the mother and daughter, yet at the same time it's quite clear that it's the only way that's possible for these to people to live, that the differences between them are two great, and too much has been said and done. How two very different people can both love each other, and yet hurt each other.

So, a wonderful touching book. Mix of light relationship fluff, historical intrigue and adventure, and real touching issues.

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