The Joy Luck Club - bookrastinating.com

Paperback, 120 pages

German language

Published Jan. 1, 2002 by Cornelsen & Oxford University Press.

ISBN:: 978-3-464-11575-6

Four mothers, four daughters, four families, whose histories shift with the four winds depending on who's telling the stories. In 1949, four Chinese women, recent immigrants to San Francisco, meet weekly to play mahjong and tell stories of what they left behind in China. United in loss and new hope for their daughters' futures, they call themselves the Joy Luck Club. Their daughters, who have never heard these stories, think their mothers' advice is irrelevant to their modern American lives – until their own inner crises reveal how much they've unknowingly inherited of their mothers' pasts.

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 …

Four mothers, four daughters, four families, whose histories shift with the four winds depending on who's telling the stories. In 1949, four Chinese women, recent immigrants to San Francisco, meet weekly to play mahjong and tell stories of what they left behind in China. United in loss and new hope for their daughters' futures, they call themselves the Joy Luck Club. Their daughters, who have never heard these stories, think their mothers' advice is irrelevant to their modern American lives – until their own inner crises reveal how much they've unknowingly inherited of their mothers' pasts.

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.

28 editions

mandy reviewed The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan

None

3 stars

Huh, I didn't realise my mum read this and that she rated it 4 stars. I wonder what her experience was like reading it and if, as a baby boomer, it helped her understand her own relationships with her immigrant parents?

I honestly expected to like this book more but ultimately, I think the experience was a little ruined by the audiobook. I listened to the version narrated by Gwendoline Yeo and it felt like she was rushing through it. I had to check that I hadn't accidentally turned the speed up. Her pronunciation was hackneyed in parts and some of the voices and accents were awful. (Some voices sounded like caricatures or parodies and others, for example the American men, were just weird). I sampled the version written by the author and it didn't sound any better.

I was really interested in the first part of the book, in …

Huh, I didn't realise my mum read this and that she rated it 4 stars. I wonder what her experience was like reading it and if, as a baby boomer, it helped her understand her own relationships with her immigrant parents?

I honestly expected to like this book more but ultimately, I think the experience was a little ruined by the audiobook. I listened to the version narrated by Gwendoline Yeo and it felt like she was rushing through it. I had to check that I hadn't accidentally turned the speed up. Her pronunciation was hackneyed in parts and some of the voices and accents were awful. (Some voices sounded like caricatures or parodies and others, for example the American men, were just weird). I sampled the version written by the author and it didn't sound any better.

I was really interested in the first part of the book, in the stories about the mothers, but I could not relate to the daughters at all. They were spoiled, judgmental, competitive and gossipy. I considered that the issue might be the generation of the daughters but I don't think that's the issue.

I have to think it's this book. I grew up reading authors like Margaret Atwood and Milan Kundera. I've never had such a strong feeling of not relating to a book on a generational level before.

At the back of my mind though, I wonder if I wouldn't have related to this more if I'd read it back in the 90s when I saw it on my aunt's bookshelf and when the film was all the rage.

I'm currently reading Margaret Atwood's <em>Cat's Eye</em> for the first time in decades, so watch this space to see if I just can't relate to late modern literature* on the same level as I did 30 years ago.

*and by this I mean literature written between 1960 and 1995