Review for "Lady Tan's Circle of Women" by Lisa See

The challenge that historical fiction books face is the same as that of high fantasy. When you're writing about a time period that is foreign to the majority of your readership, you essentially have the same burden of world building like a fantasy novel would. I don't have a lot of knowledge on 15th century China, and I feel like I have more now after reading this book. However, it came at the expense of the narrative. The book has a lot of info dumping like you would find in a fantasy book. There were often long torrents of telling-not-showing and just explaining the background of certain practices. The upshot was an extremely clunky narrative that put me at a distance from connecting to the characters.

One of the highlights of this book was Yunxian's friendship with Meiling. It was a very Princess and the Pauper friendship that was difficult to read at times, but overall it's what allowed me to connect to the characters. I loved that the concept of this book revolved around a woman doctor (which wasn't even allowed at the time), but I almost wish we had gotten to see more of her doctoring. It seemed that the details of her treating patients was glossed over in order to make room for the aforementioned period info-dumping. The part at the end where Yunxian removes the worms from her mother-in-law's throat was the most thrilling part of the plot by far. I was also excited at the prospect of the smallpox outbreak and I believe it had great potential, but Yunxian is just like "you don't treat smallpox, people either survive or they don't" which is probably accurate but not very satisfying for the reader.

The book was obviously well-researched and I was moderately intrigued throughout, but there just wasn't enough personality in the book for me to love it.

Final verdict: The book is interesting but suffers from consistent info-dumping.