Reading for a second time I'm again undone by Tan's insight into the thorny details of mother/daughter relationships. ( )

Maybe my first reading of a Chinese American writer. Enjoyable. ( )

Having enjoyed Tan's memoir on writing so much - [Where the Past Begins] - it was quite enlightening to dip into her first novel for the first time. Knowing the story behind the story enhanced the narrative for me. There is so much about identity, what makes it and how it counterbalances to self-image and how self-perception of identity can often be so skewed. Tan paints with a far more subtle brush than I think most people realize - the film version was wonderful, but it necessarily loses the subtlety Tan accomplishes here in the written version.

5 bones!!!!!
Highly Recommended ( )

This book takes a while to get into, mainly because of the changing first-person narrator. The main narrative thread is the relationships between mothers and daughters, especially in terms of the Chinese immigrant experience. There is the tension between the older generation and the younger that wholeheartedly adopts American culture to the point of marrying white American men.

The denouement is touching. Jing-Mei Woo returns to China to find the twin sisters her mother was forced to abandon during the war. The hardship that her mother experienced is so alien to modern American life. The generations are not just separated by time and culture, but also by a knowledge of suffering.

( )

When I was in middle school, we read an excerpt of The Joy Luck Club for an ELA state test. I remember enjoying it so much that as a young student I wanted to read the rest of the book, but could never remember the title. So happy that it found its way back to me all these years later!!

The Joy Luck Club follows four mothers and daughters who struggle through the differences that come from living in different countries, generations, and cultures. This book was truly one of my top reads of the year, and I felt like Amy Tan did a beautiful job at artfully sharing core challenges of immigrants and Chinese American families. One of the things that I've seen discussed in the other comments is the "short story" style of the book--each chapter is a story about one of the women and a formative experience that they had. Most of the chapters could have held their own as standalones, which I liked, but I could see how some people might prefer that the chapters neatly connect with each other in some way. In the end, I think the book's format fits the spirit of Amy Tan's writing perfectly. It reflects how people's lives really are; there is not always straightforward continuity or a resolution to the pieces of our lives. Despite tremendous growth and efforts to accept their differences, at the end of the book there were still traumas and issues left on the table between mothers and daughters. In our own lives, rarely are we ourselves able to wholly resolve every single thing either. Some of the stories weren't meant to have resolutions at all, and just showed how the women were shaped into the people they became later on. I think that there is a certain beauty in that, that things happen and people grow and change in response to those things continuously, without a clear beginning, middle, and end. This book was certainly thought provoking in this regard. Loved it so much! ( )