Reviews with content warning for Rape - Lady Tan's Circle of Women

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Lady Tan's Circle of Women by Lisa See

14 reviews

mdwsn27's review against another edition

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informative mysterious slow-paced

3.75

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liblibby's review against another edition

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challenging informative reflective slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.0

This book is so unlike what I generally read. I tend to stay away from books that take place in fantasy worlds or ancient history or cultures just because it's hard for my brain to take in a story and character development while also understanding this world that's being created--essentially from scratch, to me. That's why I generally stick to stories that are rooted in something similar to my world. This book took place in 1400's China and I'm really surprised that I picked up on it so quickly.

It took me a long, long time to read this book just because I found myself Googling everything. I rarely had a reading session that didn't end in falling down a Google rabbit hole. I learned so much and really enjoyed giving this story my full attention.

This story follows Tan Yunxian from her birth until her mid-life. She was a real person who was born into an elite family and eventually raised by her grandparents--doctors, who trained her in the ways of medicine. Even though women doctors were practically nonexistant at that time.
This book follows her--her deep, longstanding friendship with the local midwife, and all the other women who come alongside her in her life.

I have one main complaint about the book and one 1/2 complaint which contains a spoiler--I'll start with the first. The book is called Lady Tan's Circle of Women but she doesn't even gather her circle of women until the last 40 pages of the book. I wish this book had been named something like "Lady Tan: Women Doctor" or something like that. Because I was looking for female camaraderie and I feel like that really didn't even happen in a satisfying way until the end. And Tan Yunxian lived to be in her 90's--so it's not like she didn't have any more life to draw from.

My last complaint is, honestly, rooted in my 21st century sensibilities:

So much of this book was dedicated to pointing out the inhumanity that women were experiencing at this time in this part of the world. From footbinding to the class system they must live by to the way they're raised to not even look up at the world around them, to the ways so many women were sold into sex work whether they wanted it or not. So much of the book is focused on that, that you expect that when Yunxian is finally at a station where she can make a change to any of it, she would. But she doesn't. She breaks her daughters' feet. She buys concubines for her husband. She even helps a man be sentenced to torture and decapitation because of something that her mother-in-law forced him to do... She's kind to the women around her. She eventually writes a book to help women care for the health of the people in her household--which is no small thing. But I was so disappointed in her character. That being said, I realize that she's a real person who really lived in a world so completely differently from mine. I can not judge her at all. But if there was no interest in addressing these issues, I sort of wish the author had handled the topics differently.

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kappafrog's review against another edition

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emotional informative reflective tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

I love the idea behind this book of fleshing out what Tan Yuxian's life might have been like. This was rich with historical details. I really appreciated how See struck a balance between making the female characters in a deeply patriarchal world sympathetic while not being afraid to show the ways they perpetuated many of their culture's harmful practices against women. While this did make the protagonist less likeable the older she got, I still found it a compelling story. We as modern readers (rightly) find footbinding disgusting, but it was reality for centuries of women in China, and See did a good job exploring the realities of how women had to cope with that system.

At the core of this book is the way communities of women in Ming China could band together to support each other, and that made for a very good read. I'd also note that the relationship between Meiling and Yanxian came across as pretty sapphic, with Yanxian frequently struck by Meiling's beauty. I thought it was realistic that they didn't pursue a relationship, but I felt like the romantic aspect between them was an important part of the book.

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story_singer_101's review against another edition

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challenging emotional

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

This is a well-done book that takes the reader into the life and world of 15th-century China--with all its beauty and flaws. I appreciated how this book delved into Chinese medicine and that it didn't shy away from or romanticize the problems that 15th-century China faced. This is a book that deals with topics like foot-binding, concubines, slavery, pregnancy trauma, sickness, and sexism. It is also a book about the humanity of women, the value of female friendships, and the ways that women shine even in highly repressive contexts. I had been looking forward to reading it for a while now, and I'm glad I finally did. It's a well-told story, and I appreciated how the perspectives of the characters didn't seem to be too highly modernized to make it more palatable to a modern audience. That same lack of modernization, though, may cause pretty strong culture shock for some readers, especially if they aren't already aware of some of the cultural practices and issues of the time. So read the book. It's worth it. Just make sure you can handle it first.

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