Barbara Peters, owner of The Poisoned Pen Bookstore, calls Jane Yang’s novel, The Lotus Shoes, “an excellent book”. After reading author Dana Stabenow’s review, you might want to order a copy through the Webstore. https://bit.ly/4i72cRX.
Check out Stabenow’s review of The Lotus Shoes.
It’s China in the 1880s. Little Flower is a farmer’s daughter whose father has just died who is sold by her mother as a slave to serve Linjing, the spoiled daughter of a wealthy family. Little Flower and Linjing are not destined to be friends. Little Flower is a genius at embroidery and much praised by Linjing’s mother, so naturally Linjing hates Little Flower and abuses her every chance she gets.
And that’s even before we get into the foot binding. Little Flower’s mother bound her feet to better her chances of making a good marriage. Linjing’s father is determined to embrace Western ways and has made Linjing a betrothal to a man whose family wishes him to leave his bride’s feet unbound.
“Linjing’s foot-binding ceremony should not go ahead.”
My grandmother slammed her teacup onto the table so hard that it cracked. “Do you wish to dishonor our ancestors? Golden lilies are the hallmark of every well-bred girl. No genteel mother-in-law will have a girl with big feet.”
“I have secured a betrothal for Linjing.”
“What’s wrong with the prospective groom?”
Linjing of course takes her dismay out on Little Flower by having Little Flower’s feet unbound, a process as awful and painful as the binding was in the first place.
And it goes downhill from there. Linjing’s family falls apart and she is shipped off to the Chinese equivalent of a convent, which might have proved a humbling experience for anyone else but not for Linjing. She insists that Little Flower come with her, she destroys Little Flower’s chance at marriage, she won’t free her when her indenture is over, she causes Little Flower’s hand to be broken with a wooden mallet, and in a supreme act of malice she damn near gets her killed when the man they both love choses Little Flower over her.
I don’t entirely buy Linjing’s near-deathbed conversion (Little Flower’s near-deathbed, please note) but this book is an all too realistic look at the lot of women in China before the empire fell, and it is not pretty, not at all. Wives were property, their only power coming from their sons, but only if they succeeded in producing one. If they didn’t…
In the end Little Flower and Linjing escape from their lives to something approaching better ones, but this book made me think a lot about Mao. Maybe there had to be a Mao to shake Chinese culture free of a such a past. Recommended, but be warned that this novel will leave you shaken and grieving for all those little girls who had no choice in what happened to their bodies or their lives.
Dana
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