Love Beneath the Wishing Well

🌹🌹🌹🦀🦀👍👍👍 Yes, yes, yes 🌪️ Me, in my 👄

I cried until my eyes were swollen 😭

This isn't a sweet, sugary romance. It's a story about people crushed by their times, carrying heavy burdens together and pressing on through hatred and love.

🩸 [Why recommend this?]

✨ Built on accounts, with coins for blood

A silver coin dented with a crescent mark is sewn into a swaddling cloth, sinks to the bottom of a pond, and one "Great Wish" coin is saved each month. At the end of a life, it is clutched in a bloodied palm... until a nineteen-year-old girl rises onto her toes and tosses it back into the middle of the pond.

✨ The settling of hatred doesn't depend on knives

It depends on three ledgers made of tung-oil paper, a twenty-thousand-word report, a shop that still lets people buy medicine on credit, and a case brought into broad daylight by someone subjected to economic control.

✨ Mutual redemption and the aesthetics of a tragic ending

Most of the main characters don't find happy endings: one dies on the eve of settling the accounts, while another spends the rest of their life keeping books.

This whole book offers no cheap reunion, only a glimmer of light:

"The pond has been repaired, and the water has filled it. Hatred sinks to the bottom, while love floats on the surface."

📖 The complete book has 80 chapters and about 350,000 words. It traces the story from "losing one's home" to "settling the accounts."

If you love weighty stories, ensemble casts set in a bygone era, and the aesthetics of a tragic ending, come on in! 🏃‍♀️

Theme: The resilience, obsession, and letting go of a group of women crushed by their times.