"Snow Flower and the Secret Fan"

Snow Flower and the Secret Fan: A Novel (Lisa See)

I'm just gonna cut to the chase right here: This book is really bad. It's sold as a touching story about two women in China who become friends and go through life and love and stuff. Unfortunately, the writing is absolutely horrible, in multiple ways. First off, the author is trying way, way, way too hard to drive home that this is taking place in CHINA, so nobody ever just gets sick, the monkey spirit within them falls ill because the ancestors blah blah CHINA blah blah. I wouldn't have batted an eye if I'd read "Then I put on my Chinese clothes because I was in China and went outside and stood on the Chinese ground since we're in China and walked down the Chinese path in China to the Yangxi River, in China, which is where I was, China". It's just too much, and it's downright painful to read. On top of that, the book's weird, disconnected writing style means that nobody in the book feels like a real actual person so much as a exposition robot here to remind everyone that we're in China, and also, China, and BTW, China, because that's where we are, China. For spice, add in the fact that the author has farmer's daughters getting their feet bound, which I'm pretty sure only happened to upper-class ladies, and it all adds up to a really terrible book.

Grade: F-