The book, Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, is the focus of Pageturners book club's February selection. Pageturners, Schoolcraft College’s book discussion group, is offering students, staff, faculty and the community three different opportunities to discuss the bestselling book, which was made into a movie in 2011.

Snow Flower and the Secret Fan takes readers to nineteenth-century China to explore a complex friendship between two women. Lily is the daughter of a farmer in Puwel Village, and Snow Flower is the daughter of a respectable family from Tongkou. Though the two girls have very different backgrounds, Madame Wang pairs the two as laotong, or ‘old sames,’ a bond that will last a lifetime. Together Snow Flower and Lily endure the agony of foot-binding, and reflect upon their arranged marriages, share loneliness, and the joys and tragedies of motherhood. When a misunderstanding arises, their deep friendship threatens to tear apart. Snow Flower and the Secret Fan provides the reader with a variety of experiences as a portrait of a partriachal culture that valued boys and banished girls to a lesser sphere, and as an exploration of friendship in all its ups and downs, jealousies, loyalties, and betrayals.

Snow Flower and the Secret Fan will be discussed Monday, February 20, 2012, at 4 p.m. and again Tuesday, February 21 at 1:30 p.m. in the Bradner Library on the college’s main campus in Livonia, and Thursday, February 23 at 10 a.m. at the Radcliff Center in Garden City. The book discussions are free and open to the public. The book is available at significant discount at the Schoolcraft College Bookstore. For more information about Pageturners’ future book selections and discussions, visit http://sites.google.com/site/scpageturners.

Schoolcraft College is a public, two-year college offering classes at the main campus in Livonia, Haggerty Road between Six and Seven Mile Roads; at the Radcliff Center in Garden City; and online at www.schooclraft.edu.