Snow Flower and the Secret Fan - Lisa See

This was an excellent book. It's set very convincingly in 19th century provincial China and written as the memoirs of an 80-year-old women recording her memories in the secret women's writing developed in that area. The narrative voice is consistent and authentic sounding, and the story is detailed and human with interesting, flawed characters. I'd heard of foot-binding, but I didn't really comprehend the risks, the extent of the resulting deformity, or what the final product was (feet 4 inches long, coming to a point, with the four small toes broken and bent to curve under the foot and the bones of the arch broken and forced upwards). Terrifying, and also just one of the ways in which women of that society were crippled (girls and women left the upper rooms of their homes only a handful of times per year).