"Only the best novelists can do what Lisa See has done, to bring to life not only a character but an entire culture, and a sensibility so strikingly different from our own. This is an engrossing and completely convincing portrayal of a woman shaped by suffering forced upon her from her earliest years, and of the friendship that helps her to survive."Arthur GoldenThis author has written three previous novels, "Flower net", "The interior", and "Dragon bones"; and a memoir, "On Gold Mountain". This current entertaining story is set in nineteenth century China when girls had their feet bound and spent the rest of their lives in seclusion, illiterate, and isolated. In one remote county, women developed their own secret code, "nu shu"---meaning "women's writing"---the only gender-based written language to be found extant in the world. A very imaginative, original story, by a gifted storyteller...