The Joy Luck Club

Whew! I am really on the home stretch now with my New Classics Challenge. While I said I was going to read my remaining three books: The Joy Luck Club, Eva Luna, and The Kite Runner in that same order and without reading any books in between in order to make my deadline, that won't be the case. I already read out of order (The Kite Runner was first instead of last) and now I see that it is only January 8th and I am already down to just one book, so I can treat myself to some new YA and chica lit books that I just got and have been dying to read.

I really had a love-hate relationship with The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan. At one point toward the middle of the book I was ready to toss the book aside. The general idea of the book is of Chinese women who come to the United States and raise their daughters (American citizens). The women know each other because they all belonged to the "Joy Luck Club" that one of the women decided to start.

The book is divided into four sections. The book starts where the club creator has just died and her daughter, Jing-mei Woo, is finding out about how she has two twin sisters in China. The remaining chapters in the first section are told from the other three women from the club. Then the two middle sections are four chapters from each of the daughters' perspectives and it once again ends with a section of a chapter for each mother, with the exception of the last chapter being from Jing-mei again. I liked that Jing-mei was a consistent character through all four sections and that her perspective framed the book.

I usually love books from multiple perspectives, but this book was a little too busy with perspectives since the stories were very loosely linked together. There were a few mentions of one of the other characters but for the most part each mother-daughter duo had their own distinct story line. Only, I had to keep on flipping back through to remind myself of which mother-daughter stories matched together. I would often get absorbed into a certain plot line only to find myself at the end of a chapter and going back to trying to remember which was the next plot line. Yet, I know that they were linked together in a more symbolic sense.

Another aspect that I was not expecting is that when I first heard of the book I was picturing it as being a book where I would relate to the daughters, but because of the generations in the book it was more like reading about my grandparents and parents. However, there were some themes that still seemed relevant to my generation.

I conclude The Joy Luck Club with mixed feelings, but it ended with a high point as I loved the ending.