# REC: THE BONESETTER'S DAUGHTER by Amy Tan *The Urth list — 1 messages, 1 voices, 05 Jul 2008* > Exported from an unofficial mirror of a public mailing list. Copyright > in each message remains with the person who wrote it. > Email addresses are obscured as `user at host`, the form the original > archive published. This file was rebuilt from parsed fields rather than > retained headers, so it is faithful in content but not byte-exact. --- ### Jeff Wilson *05 Jul 2008, 22:41* THE BONESETTER'S DAUGHTER by Amy Tan I just realized that this book is like a fully worked out example of a Gene Wolfe puzzle story, only with a revealing resolution. It's got mythologizing, de-mythologizing, nested stories, unreliable narrators, multiple autobiographies, real science, pseudoscience, superscience, magic, ghosts, psychic powers, journeys of transformation, colonialism, war, syncretism, the cruel lives of children, metafiction, and even some plain old drama, sex, and violence. Even a little torture and a hint of execution! In particular, the successive stories are an example of fictional relaxation in the 5HC sense, and contributed more to my understanding as a western reader of the general eastern and specifically Chinese perspective than everything else I've read, watched, or experienced. Highly recommended! ``` Jeff Wilson - jwilson at io.com < http://www.io.com/~jwilson > ``` ---