At her best, Amy Tan uses a lyrical voice and a deft grasp of America's fondness for unthreatening exotica to explore how conflicting cultural expectations and generational miscommunications define family relationships. But The Bonesetter's Daughter is not Amy Tan at her best. Even with only four novels under her belt, she's becoming predictable: Bonesetter's protagonists read like streamlined, almost caricatured versions of her earlier creations. Once again, Tan's central conceit is the face-off between a dutiful but harried American-born woman and her demanding, unreasonable, Chinese-born mother. Once again, learning about the mother's secret history teaches the daughter to see the human soul hidden under her mother's off-putting blend of pride, spite, superstition, meddling, cheapness, and comical pidgin English. And once again, the daughter's new understanding of her mother provides a basis for a new understanding of herself. The major variation in the formula this time around is that the mother, LuLing Young, is suffering from Alzheimer's Disease, which might have put a stronger tragic spin on the story if she weren't such a fussy, irrational, childlike woman before her symptoms manifested. Under the lifelong pressure of LuLing's nagging and manipulative threats of suicide, Ruth Young has ultimately become so eager to please that, as an adult, she voluntarily pays bills, runs errands, and handles household repairs for a man who openly basks in the lack of formal commitment in their relationship. (Even after moving in with her ailing mother to provide full-time supervision, Ruth regularly visits "home" to care for her boyfriend and his obnoxious teenage daughters.) When she finally translates and reads a personal history LuLing wrote for her long ago, Ruth gets a new picture of her mother as a defiant teenager, grieving orphan, and struggling wife in the dangerous and richly complex culture of pre-war China. The lengthy description of LuLing's past reads like vintage Tan—evocative, moving, and packed with cultural detail. But elsewhere, the novel simply never coheres. It's hard to reconcile the focused, independent, bereaved young LuLing with the petty tyrant she becomes, and it's harder yet to buy Ruth's boyfriend's abrupt alteration from world-class ass to solicitous lover. While Bonesetter's individual segments are involving, the gaps between them are far too wide and far too readily glossed over. And for a novel that is, at its heart, about making historical and emotional connections, that's a fatal flaw.