Set in late 19th-century China, Ting-Xing Ye’s short chapter book White Lily is the story of a young girl (named White Lily) who rebels against the cruel practice of foot binding. A norm amongst girls of affluent families for hundreds of years, foot binding was thought to augment beauty and enhance one’s chances for a favourable marriage. At the age of four, a girl’s toes would be bent excruciatingly down toward the soles of her feet and bandaged tightly. Over time the deformity would become irreversible, and the woman’s feet would become “golden lilies” though it was necessary for the feet to be painfully bound for the rest of a woman’s life. Some feet were no longer than 10 centimetres. The smaller, the better, it was thought. Young readers are likely to be as appalled as I was that such a thing happened as recently as 1949.

But a piece of children’s fiction whose main purpose is to address an issue bears a potentially crippling burden. Sadly the reader’s involvement in Ye’s story is likely to be minimal. The whole injustice of foot binding seems to be what drives the story and we never really get inside the young heroine’s skin and see things through her eyes. Ye’s omniscient narrative voice relies too heavily on distant exposition, and the point of view, rather than being White Lily’s, meanders amongst the other members of her family: her brother, mother, and father. Ye’s protagonist is too transparently a pawn of her narrative intent. White Lily is the pure, allegorical child hero who not only questions the age-old practice of foot binding, but dares to want to be a scholar like her brother and father. And so, White Lily embarks upon, and fulfills, her quest with the strangely dispassionate certainty of a fairy tale automaton.

With her brother as co-conspirator, White Lily learns how to write in secret, hiding the squares of paper on which she practises beneath her bandages. This has the happy side effect of allowing her toes the space to resume their normal position, and so on her father’s birthday, she delivers a triple whammy: she recites him poetry before the assembled guests (moderately scandalous), writes Happy Birthday for him (hugely scandalous), and then removes her bandages to show her undeformed feet. In true fairy tale fashion, her father conveniently transforms from stern autocrat to benevolent patriarch and, remembering how he once defied his father, agrees that White Lily should be allowed to go to school, feet unfettered. In the book’s morally edifying and wholly indigestible final lines, White Lily cries “I’m free!” over the rice paddies.

It’s a rare moment of melodrama when, throughout, Ye’s aloofness of tone recalls that of a fairy tale. Her writing is eloquent, confident, yet oddly anemic, given the pain of White Lily’s trials, and the determination she must surely have possessed to overcome insuperable odds. We never really see White Lily being spirited or rebellious or believable as a child. All this detachment seems strange when you read one of Ye’s earlier picture books, Share the Sky, about a contemporary Chinese girl who lives with her grandparents until her own parents are ready to receive her in North America. Here, Ye does capture her hero’s personality and fears and desires, and the result is a very moving story. In White Lily, the whole subject of foot binding seems to have overwhelmed the story and purged it of character.

I also couldn’t help wondering if White Lily doesn’t break more taboos than might be plausible for the time. In some ways, the book’s format is too brief to do justice to such a story. Clearly the subject matter and vocabulary are too sophisticated for a picture book audience, yet this story doesn’t really fit comfortably in the chapter book format either. We skate over practically everything: White Lily’s day-to-day life, her whole childhood in fact. For readers to be engaged fully with the characters we need more time with them. Then, kids, as they read, can start imagining the visceral horror of foot binding – this could happen to me – instead of seeing it as just something cruel and weird that happened to other people a long time ago somewhere else. But the characters remain ciphers, and the few muted pen and ink drawings that break up the text do little to create a greater sense of mood or place, and don’t provide us with any greater insight into the characters’ personalities.

The author of a memoir about her extraordinary life during the Cultural Revolution in China, A Leaf in the Bitter Wind (Doubleday 1997), Ye is clearly passionately involved in the history, past and present, of the country of her birth. In a lengthy afterword for White Lily, she writes that her inspiration for the story came from her great-aunt, who suffered her whole life from bound feet. Clearly the topic means a great deal to the writer. But in the end, White Lily comes across as a story more concerned with its subject than its characters.