In The Bonesetter’s Daughter, Amy Tan draws the heartbreaking, complex picture of the relationship between Ruth Young, the middle-aged Chinese-American daughter of LuLing. LuLing’s story is woven into Ruth’s life just as quickly and mercilessly as it is threaded into the reader’s life. It is a sad tale involving dragon bones, World War II China, love, death, and acceptance. Ruth assists in the writing of self-help books; on top of her problems with the authors she helps, she is increasingly finding difficulty with her home situation – Art, her boyfriend, is a divorcee with two daughters, and her struggle to understand her mother’s words is apparent.

LuLing has given her a chance to understand her, however; Ruth receives a diary of sorts describing – well, she isn’t sure. She holds on to it for a long time as her Chinese is terrible, and it’s not until she finally submits it to an expert to translate that she realizes LuLing’s signs of Alzheimer’s aren’t quite as bad as she suspects. She discovers with the reader the truth of LuLing’s past, the significance of ghosts, and the beauty that can come from healing past scars.

This was my first Norman Mailer book. Popping in and out of book forums around the Internet I discovered that a lot of people hold this author in very high regard. Some people even have related handles, and to create an alias from a living person (well, living at the time) must imply a certain degree of admiration. So I decided I would read a Norman Mailer book sometime, and it was when I was trying to decide which one looked interesting to me that The Castle in the Forest came out. Enamored as I am with European history of that era, the contest ended. This was going to be my first Norman Mailer book. It would decide whether or not I’d continue on to another one.

This is not for the weak of heart. The Book Thief, as I said in my review, may be too painful a work to read especially for those who find the events to be too close for comfort. This, however, is a vivid illustration of an Austrian family ridden with incest, hatred, fear, apprehension, manipulation, and above all, a mother’s love. This is not just the story of Adolf Hitler’s childhood; it is an explanation of the seeds which created his evil and a portrait of the mother and father who nourished him.