Consequences and Every Eye

I'm late posting about the 2 latest Persephone Books to be added to my 2008 list: Consequences by EM Delafield (No. 13) and Every Eye by Isobel English (No. 18).

Consequences was rather frustrating to read because I found the heroine, Alex, so awkward and neurotic, but at the same time, much as I hate to admit it, there was a part of me that identified with her because, like me, she's the eldest of 3 with a younger sister and brother. And, like me, she feels that she knows best - but I suppose that's true of any older sibling.

There were many cringe-worthy moments because Alex so desperately wanted to be liked...and she reminded me a bit of Muriel in Muriel's Wedding...which was such a hit and touted as a hopeful "feel-good" movie but I felt was annoyance because Muriel struck me as pathetic.

From the website:

EM Delafield is best-known as the author of The Diary of a Provincial Lady (1930). But her favourite among her books was Consequences (1919), the deeply-felt novel she wrote about the plight of girls given no opportunities apart from marriage.

Alex Clare is awkward and oversensitive and gets everything wrong; she refuses to marry the only young man who 'offers' and believes there is nothing left for her but to enter a convent. But that is not quite the end of her tragic story. Nor was it for EM Delafield, who also entered a convent for a year; but in her case she was able to find freedom through working as a VAD in an army hospital, 'which was emancipation of the most delirious kind. It was occupation, it was self-respect.'

Every Eye was short and sweet, though I can't say it's a story that will stay with me, and for that reason I will leave you with the description from Persephone's site:

Isobel English, the pseudonym of June Braybrooke (1920-94), wrote little but what she published was of outstanding quality. 'Sometimes, but not often, a novel comes along which makes the rest of what one has to review seem commonplace. Such a novel is Every Eye,' John Betjeman said in the Daily Telegraph on its first publication.

This 1956 novel is about a girl growing up to what could have been unhappiness but for her marriage to a carefree young(er) man. As she travels south by train to Ibiza she surveys her past life and unravels a mystery. Hence The Tablet's comment: 'This novel is a marvellous discovery. You will want to reread it immediately in the light of its astonishing final paragraph.' Muriel Spark wrote: 'The late Isobel English was an exceptionally talented young novelist of the mid-1950s. Every Eye is one of her most successful and sensitively written books, a romantic yet unsentimental story of a young woman's intricate relationships of family and love, intensely evocative of the period, remarkable in its observations of place and character.' And Anita Brookner called Every Eye 'a lucidly written account of various kinds of confusion and a valuable lesson in where to look for freedom.'

RIP Professor...

Professor Randy Pausch, who gave us The Last Lecture, succumbed to pancreatic cancer today at the age of 47.

Rest in peace, Professor.

The Hero and the Outlaw

I finally finished reading Margaret Mark and Carol S. Pearson's The Hero and the Outlaw, which my cousin, the budding Jungian analyst, had recommended to me a few years back. Prior to launching her own strategic consulting firm, Mark was an EVP at Young & Rubicam. Pearon is a pioneer in the field of applied Jungian psychology and is the President of the Center for Archetypal Studies and Applications.

The book is a dense read which lays out 12 archetypes including the Innocent, the Explorer, the Sage, the Hero, the Outlaw, the Magician, the Regular Guy/Gal, the Lover, the Jester, the Caregiver, the Creator and the Ruler that can be leveraged to create brands that resonate with consumers. Later chapters apply the archetypes to organizations and illustrate how disconnects between the organizatonal archetype and the employee make-up could lead to employee dissatisfaction.

The one example that totally resonated with me was the discussion of the re-incarnated Volkswagon Beetle:

Jay Mays, the creator of the new Beetle...likes to say that the car's design concept is as simple as three concentric circles, invoking, but reinterpreting, the spirit of its earlier incarnation. But looking at the design through the archetypal lens, we see that the "face" of the new Beetle is virtually identical to the face of an infant - with big eyes and a high, smooth forehead...Now that face, the face of the Innocent, has found expression in a unique and charming automotive design...we look at the reincarnated Beetle and want to smile. We may not know why, but we feel that it would be really great to drive one, to own one. For some inexplicable reason, we would want to own one in a primary colour. What we intuit as consumers, but cannot express, is our delight that the Innocent has been resurrected in such a clever new way.


The emphasis above is mine: When I see a Beetle, without fail, I smile...even the thought of one makes me smile. There is a part of me that wants to own one in the cheery green above but I would never actually go out and buy one because it's too cute a car and I don't feel that I am a cute person, yet the thought of it gives me pleasure...My attraction to the lovable Bug was inexplicable to me before, but now I understand. The Beetle appeals to the Innocent in me.

Oh, and MAJOR pet peeve? The poor copy-editing! So awful and distracting! I had the same problem reading The Interpretation of Murder. Mark was referred to variously by her first name and her last name, which got to be rather confusing because her last name could be a first name, and I found misplaced articles and misspelt words. Why the sloppy copy-editing??! So unnecessary and very disappointing.

Brook Evans

You know how you can sometimes fall for an author after reading just one book? I did for Jeffrey Eugenides on the strength of his opening line in Middlesex - talk about having me at "Hello" - and I so enjoyed it that I read The Virgin Suicides, which, frankly, was a bit of a disappointment.

It was love at first read with Susan Glaspell's Fidelity as well, which was why I wanted to read Brook Evans...but like Jeffrey Eugenides before her, this second date was a disappointment.

From Persephone Books' site:

The second Susan Glaspell novel we publish was the first-ever book published on the newly-launched Victor Gollancz list. Its description of the effects of two lovers' brief happiness on succeeding generations parallels Fidelity's focus on the immediate effects of an unsanctioned love affair : we see Naomi trying, misguidedly, to ensure that at least her daughter Brook (conceived beside a brook twenty years before) can be true to her passionate nature.

Like DH Lawrence, whose Lady Chatterley's Lover was also published in 1928, Susan Glaspell believed that society should respect the effects of passion instead of valuing it far less than the forces of respectability and economic security.

A film of Brook Evans, The Right to Love, was made in 1931, the year Susan Glaspell won the Pulitzer Prize for her play 'Alison's House'.

While Fidelity felt dense (in a good way) and provocative, Brook Evans felt tired and irksome. I was annoyed and unsympathetic towards the characters - particularly the title character - quite honestly, because of their piety. While I don't expect to relate to all the characters in my books, nor like them all, I do expect to feel sympathy for them, or why bother reading? But there was none, save for Naomi, Brook's mother, who I felt for in Book 1. As the novel moved forward in time though, I just felt pity for her.

Maybe I wasn't reading it with the right frame of mind because I almost didn't want to finish it. I felt I should only because I liked Fidelity so very much and hoped that this second book would redeem itself but the end seemed hasty and sloppy...predictable even.

And to think I stayed up late past midnight last night to finish it. Booo.

Profit from the Core

I read Chris Zook's Profit From the Core for the second time, not because it was so enjoyable the first time around that I felt the need to revisit it - I read it the first time to fulfill my CMA CLPD credits requirements - but because we've started a book club at work in our team and we've committed to reading a book every couple months for discussion, and this is the first title.

If you're ever in the mood for some business strategy, this is a quick read with some interesting case studies, including ones on Nike, Bausch and Lomb, and Dun & Bradstreet, and talks about how companies should focus on their core business in order to grow.

The Last Lecture

I finished reading Randy Pausch's The Last Lecture maybe a month ago but only just finished watching the lecture and it was amazing.

I first read about it in MorningNewsBeat, an industry eNewsletter I subscribe to for work and picked the book up soon after and was so glad I did because it's so very inspirational - a father giving a last lecture that's really meant for his 3 young children.

The topic and timing was so very interesting because 1) my father died of cancer abroad in China when I was a child so we never had a proper goodbye as he was there for treatment and 2) I had recently found out that wL's mother, who I already knew had died of cancer, kept her illness a secret and didn't tell her children or husband who was in Hong Kong at the time until she was literally in her deathbed. wL's birthday was just around the corner and I knew that I had to give him this book as a gift because I figured if there was anyone who would appreciate this book like I did, it would be wL.

From the dust jacket:

A lot of professors give talks titled “The Last Lecture.” Professors are asked to consider their demise and to ruminate on what matters most to them. And while they speak, audiences can’t help but mull the same question: What wisdom would we impart to the world if we knew it was our last chance? If we had to vanish tomorrow, what would we want as our legacy?

When Randy Pausch, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon, was asked to give such a lecture, he didn’t have to imagine it as his last, since he had recently been diagnosed with terminal cancer. But the lecture he gave—“Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams”—wasn’t about dying. It was about the importance of overcoming obstacles, of enabling the dreams of others, of seizing every moment (because “time is all you have…and you may find one day that you have less than you think”). It was a summation of everything Randy had come to believe. It was about living.

In this book, Randy Pausch has combined the humor, inspiration and intelligence that made his lecture such a phenomenon and given it an indelible form. It is a book that will be shared for generations to come.

The lecture runs just over one and a quarter hours but it's funny and insightful and heartwarming, and if you are so inclined, read the book. You will not be disappointed.

The Interpretation of Murder

Just finished reading Jed Rubenfeld's The Interpretation of Murder and I really enjoyed it, although the plot seemed rather convoluted. It also irked me how poorly it was copy-edited because in a number of instances I came across the same mistake straight out of Grammar 101: the use of "should of" or "would of" instead of "should've" or "would've". Granted, the only time contractions are normally used in a novel is in dialogue, but couldn't the characters' speech have been presented grammatically correct, despite how they may have pronounced things?

This isn't the novel I would typically choose to read. I first heard about it last summer from my now-former manager. His wife was reading it and he was compelled to read it himself. When I came across the title amongst Chapters.Indigo's Bargain Books, I decided to add it to my cart as one of the title to make up my min. $39 spend for free shipping. It was a quick read and certainly suspenseful. I'd recommend if you lean towards thrilling mysteries for your beach-time reads.

From the dust jacket:

The Interpretation of Murder opens on a hot summer night in 1909 as Sigmund Freud - already world famous and highly controversial - disembarks in New York from a steamship. With Freud is his rival Carl Jung; among those waiting to greet him is Dr. Stratham Younger, a gifted physician who is one of Freud's most ardent American supporters. And so begins the visit that will be the great genius's first - and only - journey to America

The morning after Freud's arrival, in an opulent penthouse across the city, a barely clad, beautiful woman is discovered murdered - whipped, mutilated, and strangled with a white silk tie. The next day, a rebellious heiress named Nora Acton barely escapes becoming the killer's second victim. yet the lovely Miss Acton, suffering from hysteria, cannot remember the terrifying incident or her attacker. Asked to consult on the case, Dr. Younger calls on the visiting Freud to guide him through the girl's analysis. As Younger is drawn into her story - her desire to attend college, her rich, difficult parents, her rejection of the mogul who has fallen in love with her - he comes to care deeply for this remarkable young woman, even as he discovers that she may still be in grave danger. Then Younger is pulled into another crisis: he learns of a series of bizarre events suggesting a conspiracy to ruin Freud's reputation.

Joining forces with the mayor, the city's eccentric coroner, and a young homicide detective named Jimmy Littlemore, Younger takes part in a murder investigation that reveals the divided soul of a great metropolis on the verge of a sophisticated, violent new era. The chase of the culprit leads throughout New York, from the grand ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria to the luxurious salons of Gramercy Park, from the rising skyscrapers that seem to dot every street corner to the bottom of the East River, where labo(u)rers are working on the new Manhattan Bridge.

Raymond and Hannah

I picked up Stephen Marche's debut novel, Raymond and Hannah in my second to last binge buy on Chapters.Indigo. It was $2 and even though I had already made up the $39 to qualify for the free shipping, I thought, why not? It's set in Toronto and I like reading about my hometown.

It was a quick read about a boy named Raymond and a girl named Hannah who have a one-night stand which turns into a one-week affair just before she flies off to Israel for a 9 month course at a yeshiva.

Paragraphs like this are exactly why I like reading about Toronto:

Built in the mid-sixties and reportedly a cause of several of its architects' suicides, the Robarts Library building is a grotesquerie parodying scholarship: it supposedly imitates a peacock (with a hundred vigilant eyes) but looks more like a turkey. Raymond's routine is formed by this architecture, the elevator down to the Fisher basement for his research into rare books and first editions, the narrow escalator up to the fourth floor for journal articles, the reading room where if he keeps shifting he can always find the perfect quantity of light in the afternoon. A false but persistent legend claims that the architects failed to take into account the weight of the books, and so the library is slowly sinking into the ground.

Now, I remember hearing about how Robarts looked like a peacock/turkey but could never see it until last summer, when I happened to be walking north, rather than my usual southerly direction down St. George. And the thing about the sinking library? I remember hearing the same rumour about Dana Porter Library, the Arts library at my alma mater, University of Waterloo, so I'm sure that myth must be weaved into every university's story.

The ending was ambiguous...not sure how I feel about that, not to say that every story should have a neat and tidy ending...but it seemed like a cop-out to me given how the plot unfolded.

Peony in Love II

So, I decided to finish Peony in Love afterall, and I'm really glad I did.

I learned a lot about Chinese cultural traditions around death and the after world...we observe many of the practices in our family but I had never really understood why and now I do...like why, when we go to my father's grave site we always bring food and burn incense and million dollar "Hell Notes", and the belief that the soul is made up of 3 parts - one which stays with the body, one which travels to the after world, and one which resides in one's ancestor tablet so they may watch over the generations to come.

I was impressed again with how well-researched this novel was - See's Snow Flower and the Secret Fan which I had read back in February was detailed in its description of the footbinding process, so much so that I cringed when reading it.

I'm now very much looking forward to her next book which is tentatively called Shanghai Girls and set in 1937 Shanghai and Los Angeles.

Peony in Love

I'm in the middle of reading Lisa See's Peony in Love and I'm not sure that I want to finish the book anymore given the latest plot development...it almost feels like a trainwreck...or maybe I'm overreacting.

That's all.

The Bookseller of Kabul

I finished The Bookseller of Kabul on my subway ride in this morning and...not sure how I feel about it...I didn't hate it, but I also didn't love it.

From the back cover:

This mesmerizing portrait of a proud man who, through three decades and successive repressive regimes, heroically braved persecution to bring books to the people of Kabul has elicited extraordinary praise throughout the world and become a phenomenal international bestseller. The Bookseller of Kabul is startling in its intimacy and details - a revelation of the plight of the Afghan women and window into the surprising realities of daily life in today's Afghanistan.

The Picador Book of Contemporary Chinese Fiction

I finished this last night on my subway ride home and was almost glad it was over. This is a collection of short fiction by Chinese writers...and I've never really been a fan of short stories. I think the reason why is that I prefer the development of plot and characters over time...I find short stories abrupt and dissatisfying.

All in all, the collection was good - my favourite was probably "Cherry" by Su Tong.

Instructions for Visitors

I picked up Helen Stevenson's Instructions for Visitors when I was in Hong Kong about 4 years ago and only just got around to reading it in the last week. I finished it a couple hours ago and am rather ambivalent about this particular title. I've read other literary travel about France before - always there's the element of romance - consider Sarah Turnbull's Almost French and Suzy Gershman's C'est La Vie - but I didn't find her written voice particularly engaging, which was rather a disappointment.

Fidelity

I finished Susan Glaspell's Fidelity last week and count it as one of my favourite books of the year:

Set in Iowa in 1900 and in 1913, this dramatic and deeply moral novel uses complex but subtle use of flashback to describe a girl named Ruth Holland, bored with her life at home, falling in love with a married man and running off with him; when she comes back more than a decade later we are shown how her actions have affected those around her. Ruth had taken another woman's husband and as such 'Freeport' society thinks she is 'a human being who selfishly - basely - took her own happiness, leaving misery for others. She outraged society as completely as a woman could outrage it... One who defies it - deceives it - must be shut out from it.'

I was struck at different times in the book by how much the moral society in Fidelity reminded me of the aspect of Chinese culture which values the collective goodwill over individuality and independence, one's own desire is selfish and must be suppressed, except, it seems slightly twisted in the novel.

Without giving away the entire story, I was heartened by how others were able to be true to themselves: "Forget society...and be just a human being! If you can forget - forgive - what seemed to you the wrong Ruth did you - if your heart goes out to her - then what else is there to it?...after all, what is society...Just a collection of individuals, isn't it? Why must it be so much harder than the individuals comprising it? If it is that - then there must be something wrong with it, wouldn't you think?"

And I was saddened and frustrated by how some of the characters behaved because that's how they were supposed to since "one isn't free. Society has to protect itself. What might not happen - if it didn't?"

The novel had a bittersweet but hopeful end and if I had to sum it up in a nutshell, I'll leave you with this, which I've come to believe, more or less, depending on my mood, in the last few years: "Love could not fail if it left one richer than it found one. Love had not failed - nothing had failed - and life was wonderful, limitless, a great adventure for which one must have great courage, glad faith. Let come what would come!"

The Architecture of Happiness

I finished The Architecture of Happiness today and am a little sad that I have because that means I won't be spending the next subway ride home reading the erudite thoughts of Alain de Botton, my not-so-secret nerd crush.

His writing always strikes a relevant and oftentimes emotional chord for me and this book is no different. I had to re-read the following passage several times because he describes what has been top-of-mind for me the last few months as I've begun to commit and make purchases for my new home come August:

Our sensitivity to our surroundings may be traced back to a troubling feature of human psychology: to the way we harbour within us many different selves, not all of which feel equally like "us", so much so that in certain moods, we can complain of having come adrift from what we judge to be our true selves.

Unfortunately, the self we miss at such moments, the elusively authentic, creative and spontaneous side of our character, is not ours to summon at will. Our access to it is, to a humbling extent, determined by the places we happen to be in, by the colour of the bricks, the height of the ceilings and the layout of the streets...

...We arrange around us material forms which communicate to us what we need - but are at risk of forgetting we need - within. We turn to wallpaper, benches, paintings and streets to staunch the disappearance of our true selves.

In turn, those places whose outlook matches and legitimates our own, we tend to honour with the term "home"...

...We need our rooms to align us to desirable versions of ourselves and to keep alive the important, evanescent sides of us.

AL teases me all the time about how much I have "going on up there" in my brain what with all the different virtual homes I have but I can't help it because there are so many different things that appeal to me for different reasons at different times - but in that moment, it feels like "me". So this was a helpful way to consider my seeming indecision about the interior design of my home.

Cheerful Weather for the Wedding

Julie Strachey's Cheerful Weather for the Wedding is Persephone Books' 38th title and, despite being only 128 pages, it was sloooow - so slow that when I picked it up for the first time a couple years ago, I had to abandon it after the first 30 pages.

This time around, it was still slow, but I slogged through it and was rewarded with a plot twist that took me by complete surprise and now I feel the need to reread it because there were parts - I admit - that I skipped through to bring the book to a speedier end.

Rereadings

I've read a number of books about writers writing about books and Rereadings: Seventeen Writers Revisit Books They Love is the most recent among them (the last couple include Anne Quindlen's Imagined London and Sara Nelson's So Many Books So Little Time).

Arthur Krystal's essay about H.C. Witwer's The Leather Pusher included an entire section about how readers grow over time, which struck a chord with me and he begins with Hugh Walpole, another writer writing about books in another collection of essays, who classified readers into two categories, "the ecstatic and the critical, allowing of course for the inevitable overlap."

Whether one becomes one kind of reader or the other, according to Walpole, depends on "some dominating influence" that appears in the life of every future reader, usually at the age of fourteen or fifteen, "that solves, partly, the question as to whether he will be in later life, an aesthetic or unaestehtic reader."...To be young was bookish heaven. At fourteen I read every word of every page; I didn't know you could skip words. Why should I when all authors were infallible; all narrators, reliable; every detail essential?...And reading was fun - not serious fun, mind you, but sequestered, magical, self-absorbed fun. Nothing mattered but the story: who won, who survived, who ended up happy, who came up short...Once the young reader gets past the stage where the brain sucks in books as if they were bubbles of oxygen, he or she begins to sense that Melville is doing something different from Steinbeck, and that Dickens and Balzac resemble each other in certain respects, but not in all. As children, we crossed wide-eyed and trusting into the writer's world, as adults we invite the writer into ours and hold him accountable for how he behaves there.

My earliest memory of reading is in the first or second grade when I used to read fairy tales. My favourite was Snow White and Rose Red and I can still remember the beautiful illustrations in the book. I grew into series reading in grade school and devoured Nancy Drew and The Babysitter's Club and teen romance series like Sweet Dreams and Sweet Valley High - I'd hole up in my bedroom for hours reading, yes, every word, even if I didn't like where the story was going, to escape into a world that was not my own. While I still enjoy books, as an adult, I'm far less patient with authors and don't feel nearly as guilty about not finishing a book once started if I find I don't like it.

The interesting thing about reading books in this writers-writing-about-other-writers genre is that they expose me to authors I've perhaps not heard of before and inspire me to pursue them further. Katherine Mansfield is a perfect example: I read some of her short stories in my high school extra credit Women in Lit English class* but didn't know much of her background and after reading about her life and stories through the eyes of Patricia Hampl in the second essay, I'm intrigued and have added her to my reading list.

* Yes, I was a nerd in high school. What of it, huh!?!?

Greenery Street

I finished Denis Mackail's Greenery Street today and have to say that I was thoroughly charmed by it, despite my impatience at times with the naivete of the young and very happily married couple, in particular, Felicity, the wife. There were moments I was so annoyed by her hopelessness that I had to put the book down.


About Persephone Books' No. 35:

PG Wodehouse described this 1925 novel as 'so good that it makes one feel that it's the only possible way of writing a book, to take an ordinary couple and just tell the reader all about them.' Greenery Street can be read on two levels - it is a touching description of a young couple's first year together in London, but it is also a homage - something rare in fiction - to happy married life.

Ian and Felicity Foster are shown as they arrive at 23 Greenery Street, an undisguised and still unchanged Walpole Street in Chelsea. Their uneventful but always interesting everyday life is the main subject of a novel that evokes the charmingly contented and timeless while managing to be both funny and profound about human relations.

Anyway, it's charming in that Mackail writes in the third person narrative and because of his theatre background we're treated to parts in the book that are laid out very much like scenes in a script with the dialogue between the young marrieds set out as if stage directions.

Here's the amusing set-up to a scene in which the couple dine with their brother-in-law:

We haven't had much space for descriptions of people in this record so far; we have rather had to take them as they came; but we must try and squeeze in a paragraph for Mr and Mrs Foster's brother-in-law - if only because he was so shy that we should never get to know him if we waited for him to make the first move.

How can one not be tickled by writing such as this?

Imagined London

I started Imagined London while waiting for my flight to Vancouver last Friday and finished it this morning. It was a good and quick read written by Anna Quindlen and serves as the armchair traveler’s tour guide through literary London – from Chaucer and Dickens’ Southwark to Monica Ali’s Brick Lane and everything in between.

My favourite passage comes in the last chapter:

…neither constitutes my most beloved place in this best beloved of cities. For that you must come down to Earth and wander aimlessly. Maybe just off Sloane Square, or in Cheval Place, or on Burnsall Street, or Elgin Crescent. Maybe in Notting Hill or South Kensington or Bloomsbury. Finally you will reach it: a house with a handsome gate or a small garden.

Around it, a street or two away, swirls the clamor of one of the busiest cities on Earth. Inside is—what? Did a debutante once wait there for her car? Did a maid slip out to meet her lover? Did street peddlers sell ribbons here, or fruit and flowers? Does it stand on the ruins of an older house, or a cow pasture, or even a Roman fort? Did the bombs shake its foundation and the modern real estate boom triple its value?

Behind every door in London there are stories, behind every one ghosts. The greatest writers in the history of the written word have given them substance, given them life.

And so we readers walk, and dream, and imagine, in the city where imagination found its great home.

Women, Virtue and Cultural Tradition

I finished Camilla Gibb's Sweetness in the Belly a couple weeks ago and Lisa See's Snow Flower and the Secret Fan just last night and was struck by some of the similarities, despite their disparate settings - the former in 1970s Harar, Ethiopia and London of the mid-1980s, and the latter in the first half of 19th Century Hunan Province in China.

Both books wrote about the ways in which cultural tradition dictates women's suffering as proof of their virtue and worthiness - in Sweetness in the Belly, it's female circumcision and in Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, it's footbinding. I read both of these scenes while riding the subway home and if any of the other passengers had happened to glance upon me at that moment, they may have wondered what I was reading that had so disturbed me.

My favourite passage in Sweetness is on page 126, when Gibb writes about how a community's history is made:

Once you step inside, history has to be rewritten to include you. A fiction develops, a story that weaves you into the social fabric, giving you roots and a local identity. You are assimilated, and in erasing your differences and making you one of their own, the community can maintain belief to its wholeness and purity. After two or three generations, nobody remembers the story is fiction. It has become fact. And this is how history is made.

My favourite of these two is Snow Flower though - perhaps because it's set in China and I could better relate to some of the customs and traditions that are discussed in the book, or maybe because the ending inspired a 4-hankie cry last night, it was so good.

Central to the novel is nu shu, which may very well be the only language ever created by women for their own exclusive use. I had never heard of it before and was fascinated: nu shu is phonetic and relies completely on context for meaning. It is made up of about 600-700 characters compared to the 5000+ that make up the Chinese written language. Women learned this secret language from their "sworn sisters" and mothers and in this way, they were able to safeguard their communications from men.