Review: The Joy Luck Club

The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



I first read The Joy Luck Club in probably 1998, as required reading for a high school English class. When I joined Goodreads, I apparently marked it as a 3-star book. I'm not sure now whether I actually didn't like it when I was younger, or if I just didn't remember how much I liked it.

This time around, I loved it. I re-read my high school copy, and was repeatedly surprised by the little parallels of phrasing that I'd underlined and cross-referenced in the different stories. In order to have caught them, I must have been just devouring the book -- I've been reading it much more slowly and choppily this time, and that sort of detail would have slipped right past me.

So The Joy Luck Club is very nice as literature -- parallels between the parallel story threads, linking the mothers to their daughters and their families to each other before you really find out much about how they really interact. It's also thoroughly absorbing to read.

(When you have to put it down and pick it up a lot, as I did this time, it can get difficult to remember who was talking. Eight point-of-view characters is a lot to keep track of, even when their stories are pretty clearly distinct, and especially because one of the many things the stories are about is how we can misunderstand each other.)

I picked up The Joy Luck Club off my shelf this time because I recently read Amy Chua's Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, which of course makes mention of it. Since I had brought them to the lunch table in that order, several of my friends commented on how I was reading all these books with terrible mothers in them. But they're not! And really, the Joy Luck Club mothers (and their mothers) are no way, nohow supposed to be the kind of unsympathetic meanies that we're all supposed to think the Tiger Mother is. People are more complicated than that, which is one of the points of both books.





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