Wednesday, February 4, 2009

Book 12: Snow Flower and the Secret Fan

cover_snowflower_L2 Let me just go on record and hear and say that if school continues to be canceled at its current rate, I'll be through fifty books by March.

Not quite, but it sure feels like I've had a LOT of reading time on my hands...and not much in the way of, oh, doing my job.  Technically, this isn't the 12th book I've read, either.  It's the 16th.  But I'm waiting to tell you about a series of books until I've finished all of them.  So hopefully by the end of the week.

But about this book: I loved it.  Seriously loved it.  It was beautifully written, and a very sweet, sorrowful story.  It's about the life of a girl in 18th century China.  It follows her life from just before her foot-binding to her death.  A good majority of the novel deals with her relationship with her laotong, a girl who is her "just same" according to the eight things that need to be matched in the Chinese calendar.  It's a beautifully written story about the relationship these two women share, the lives they lead, and everything in between.  There lives are not easy, they were never meant to be.  A recurring theme of the novel is the idea that having daughters is worthless, and that women's lives are spent in constant turmoil and sorrow.  It was slow and sweet...and I really enjoyed it. 

1 comment:

Jenna said...

I need to be writing all these books down. You are like my personal book critic! Yay!