Review – The Joy Luck Club

The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan

From amazon.com –

Four mothers, four daughters, four families whose histories shift with the four winds depending on who’s “saying” the stories. In 1949 four Chinese women, recent immigrants to San Francisco, begin meeting to eat dim sum, play mahjong, and talk. United in shared unspeakable loss and hope, they call themselves the Joy Luck Club. Rather than sink into tragedy, they choose to gather to raise their spirits and money. “To despair was to wish back for something already lost. Or to prolong what was already unbearable.” Forty years later the stories and history continue.  With wit and sensitivity, Amy Tan examines the sometimes painful, often tender, and always deep connection between mothers and daughters. As each woman reveals her secrets, trying to unravel the truth about her life, the strings become more tangled, more entwined. Mothers boast or despair over daughters, and daughters roll their eyes even as they feel the inextricable tightening of their matriarchal ties. Tan is an astute storyteller, enticing readers to immerse themselves into these lives of complexity and mystery.

My thoughts –

I enjoyed this book immensely.  The portions told by the mothers about their lives growing up in China were fascinating, because Tan crafted a remarkable story for each mother about love, loss and sacrifices back in China.  All four of the mothers had such high hopes for their daughters, that they wouldn’t have to deal with any of the tragedies they themselves survived in their childhoods.  It was so interesting, then, to read about these mothers through their daughters’ eyes – what they thought of their mothers’ old-fashioned, old school Chinese ways, how they felt they could never live up to their mothers’ high expectations, and how they both loved and hated their mothers, creating incredible internal conflicts for all four daughters.  Amy Tan’s writing is fluid and very accessible, this is the first book of hers that I have read, and I really enjoyed the way she wrote it.  The only gripe I have about this novel is that I feel like I didn’t get to know the characters as much as I wanted to.  Perhaps if the book was longer there would have been more substance to each woman, or maybe if Tan focused on two mother-daughter relationships instead of four.  Having said that, I still really loved this book and am happy to recommend it.

Rating: 9/10