The Joy Luck Club: A Novel Kindle Edition

A different kind of read. I almost stopped reading because the story was so painful. I’m glad that I continued. Explanations came. Memories came. love and family came and made sense of the unknown. All in all a moving tale.

Despite being aware of this book when it came out and all the acclaim it immediately garnered, I've been about twenty years late to this book. It was well worth the wait. And I'm sure I got more from it now than I would have then, as my own relationship with my mother has evolved over the years.Because that's what this book is about: mothers who don't understand their daughters, and daughters who only very gradually begin to understand their mothers. Add to this a cultural shift from Chinese-born mothers to American-born daughters, and those relationships take on yet another distortion that challenges even the best of intentions to connect.There's so much about this book I loved: the complex lives with rich backstory, the complicated relationships, the quirky personalities (especially of the mothers), and the wonderful way Tan used those characters to flip my view of the USA. "So-so security" rather than "social security" is one phrasing I'll always remember.Perhaps because I was so eager to see what was happening with these characters that I read more quickly than I should have, or perhaps because the cultural differences between me and the characters were deep, but the characters were often blurred for me. I was grateful for the little cheat sheet, the character list, to help me keep everyone straight.The Joy Luck club is everything wonderful you've heard it is -- but you'll get more than a good read out of it. Much more. It will touch you personally in ways you won't expect, and open your eyes to a world that's probably been invisible to you. This is a rare gift from a book, and one you won't want to pass by.

This is a great novel for anyone who wants a book they can relate to as an Asian American with first generation parents. Amy Tan is one of the greats of our generation and her writing is raw and concise. A wonderful read for a plane ride!

This book is almost like a collection of short stories, but they weave together and tell about the lives of four women, Chinese immigrants who came to San Francisco around about 1949/1950-ish, met through Church meetings, English classes, work. It is also the stories of their daughters and how different their lives are to their Chinese mothers, but also the similarities. How grief in one land still hurts the same in another, in another life pain is still pain. Joy is still joy. And family can make anywhere feel like home, can help you find answers to questions your whole life may have been prodding you to answer. Jing-mei, the main character, and her mother seem like they are not close in life, Jing-mei's memories of her mother do not paint a close mother-daughter relationship the way that Americans would see it, but the love and reverence Jing-mei has for her mother and her worries that she was not enough, not enough to make her mother happy when what she had left behind in China was so wonderful and yet such a loss and gave her so much pain for the rest of her life, until right before her death she found a little hope that maybe she just might have found... Jing-mei's journey is so awesome, and the stories are so engrossing and interesting. I've read this book probably three or four times in 15 years and each time I come back I'm very happy I did. Just finished it again and such a great novel! Maybe I will try another Amy Tan book now? I like her pacing and her characters very much. Side note: the movie that was made from this book is pretty good as well. Good editing and it doesn't chop the stories up and take away from them like a lot of book to film adaptations do.

Read it

Each story was very interesting. But, it was like reading a book of short stories. I could barely remember one person's story from another, except the chess player stood out for me. But I couldn't remember whose mother was who, I would have needed to take notes. And then, there wasn't any real connection between these people, how and why they knew each other or were friends. Plus it seemed there was just one idea about all the mothers....that they were old- fashioned, whiny, rigid mother's. I was always absorbed in the stories, but as a book, it just didn't flow together for me. Wish I had taken lots of notes, but I don't want to be doing that while I'm enjoying a novel.

As usually happens with me and older books, I watched the movie first, many years ago now. I loved it, the glimpses into these women's lives, the heartache and happiness of it all, the realness of the characters. I watched it often as a teenager, and it's stuck with me, in the back of my mind. I'm bummed that it took me so long to read the book itself.I love the book as much as I love the movie. The ending still made me cry. I look at the various mother-daughter relationships much differently now that I'm in my 40s and a mother of teenage girls myself, rather than the teenager I was when I watched it with my own mother, only able to really relate to the daughters at that time. Now, I understand certain things better and recognize pieces of myself in all of the mothers and all of their daughters now. Their stories are richly told, in their own distinct voices, and you can't help but be carried away with them as you read.It's definitely worth reading again.