At the heart of this new-in-paperback novel by the author of The Joy Luck Club lies the terrible fragility of memory-and how time robs us piece by piece of our own past. Her main characters are instantly recognizable Tan types. American-born writer Ruth Young realizes it’s time to mend fences with Alzheimer’s-beset mother, LuLing, before she loses her chance. She discovers two secret memoirs, and through them learns the family past mom never told her about. Bonesetter becomes LuLing’s story, jumping from present-day California to her 1920s childhood in the Chinese region where Peking Man was first dug up by anthropologists. She and her sister plot to escape their tradition-bound mountain village, and along the way she has secrets of her own to learn. All of which reminds us that next time we visit the grandparents, we ought to bring a tape recorder and an afternoon’s worth of questions about our own family archaeology.
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