Women of the Silk - Gail Tsukiyama

I remember my stepsister reading Women of the Silk when she was in middle school or early high school and loving it, and while I creeped on her bookshelf many times, this was never a book that I actually picked up.  Having read The Samurai's Garden within the past few years, however, this seemed like a good book to read when I came across it in a used bookstore.

The story follows Pei from her girlhood to young adulthood in rural China, where she first lives with her family on a farm for mulberry leaves and fish ponds, and then--for most of the book--inside a silk factory, where her father takes her when the family encounters financial difficulties.  As Pei grows older, she clings to relationships she's built in the factory and her dormitory-style home outside of it as surrogates for her birth family and comes to terms with an independence that most women in this time period in China were not able to gain for themselves.

The writing in this book is very simplistic, and while sometimes I felt like the style fit the narrative, at other times it felt like Tsukiyama was info-dumping, just pouring out information about side characters because she wanted them to be more important than they ultimately were to Pei's own narrative.  Pei herself was a strong-minded character but one who was still adrift, which worked well for the story.  What I was never entirely sure of was her exact relationship with Lin; sometimes it seemed completely platonic, then Tsukiyama would throw in something about desire, and then it would go back to being platonic, so it was a bit baffling in that way.

The setting was perfect for this place and time period; starting during the Great Depression and going forward into World War II, Pei is relatively sheltered from global events, but we as readers can still see the world's wider influence bearing down upon the silk factory and the girls who work there.  The slow encroachment of the Japanese, the conflicts involving communists, all of it kind of swirls around Pei without touching her, until it finally slams into the silk factory.  It was a good method of setting the story, but there was one problem with it: because none of this ever really touches Pei, I never felt like she actually matured as a character.  At the end of the book, she felt just as young as she did at the beginning of the book, almost two decades before.

Overall, though, this was a lovely book.  It appears there's a sequel, though this hasn't been formally slotted into a series, and I might check that out at some point if I can get it from the library, though it's not something I feel a need to rush out and buy.

3.5 stars out of 5.