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Title: Snow Flower and the Secret Fan
Author: Lisa See
Genre: Historical fiction/women's lit (Taiping Rebellion era rural China)
Thingummies: 3
Synopsis: At the time of their footbinding, two Chinese girls are joined together in a sworn friendship that will last a lifetime, despite their own flaws.
Thoughts: Having just read a masterpiece set in ancient China, Under Heaven, I've been trying to figure out why this book left me so cold while that one swept me away. There is exhaustively researched detail here, which I usually quite like. The scope is far more contained and the protagonist small minded and uncurious. It's appropriate for the subject matter--a rural farmer's daughter in nineteenth-century China would have barely been able to leave her own house after her footbinding, and both physical and society-imposed limits seems likely to have kept her mind small, like a bonsai tree that can never outgrown its pot.
But while it's justifiable, I felt that it makes for a cramped narrative. The Good Earth and Memoirs of a Geisha managed to let women of similar circumstance lead far richer emotional lives than Lily manages. Perhaps it's because the protagonist herself is petty and needy. She's aware of it and admits it, and foretells her own comeuppance, but it doesn't make it any more pleasant to read.
It's an interesting little book with perfectly adequate construction. It just feels tailor-made for women's reading groups to tut-tut at and remind themselves of how superior we modern Americans are to these ignorant women (who did the best they could within the constraints of their culture). And so I never really warmed up to it.
Author: Lisa See
Genre: Historical fiction/women's lit (Taiping Rebellion era rural China)
Thingummies: 3
Synopsis: At the time of their footbinding, two Chinese girls are joined together in a sworn friendship that will last a lifetime, despite their own flaws.
Thoughts: Having just read a masterpiece set in ancient China, Under Heaven, I've been trying to figure out why this book left me so cold while that one swept me away. There is exhaustively researched detail here, which I usually quite like. The scope is far more contained and the protagonist small minded and uncurious. It's appropriate for the subject matter--a rural farmer's daughter in nineteenth-century China would have barely been able to leave her own house after her footbinding, and both physical and society-imposed limits seems likely to have kept her mind small, like a bonsai tree that can never outgrown its pot.
But while it's justifiable, I felt that it makes for a cramped narrative. The Good Earth and Memoirs of a Geisha managed to let women of similar circumstance lead far richer emotional lives than Lily manages. Perhaps it's because the protagonist herself is petty and needy. She's aware of it and admits it, and foretells her own comeuppance, but it doesn't make it any more pleasant to read.
It's an interesting little book with perfectly adequate construction. It just feels tailor-made for women's reading groups to tut-tut at and remind themselves of how superior we modern Americans are to these ignorant women (who did the best they could within the constraints of their culture). And so I never really warmed up to it.
