The Joy Luck Club

Rating:
Summary: GIVE ME A BREAK
Review: This book is soooooo sterotyped!!!!!! Normal Chinese are nowhere as weird and brain-dead as that. Ask any Chinese, they'll totally understand what I mean. By the way, isn't it sick how all Chinese women are portrayed as China Dolls?

Rating:
Summary: Not just a novel of culture-shock
Review: This novel was excellent! Bravo Amy Tan for bringing us "The Joy Luck Club." Other than the points already made above as to the greatness of this novel I would like to add one more. This novel also comments on mother-daughter relationships and how they actually are, not what we see on television. They're complex and confusing. Amy Tan did a remarkable job capturing this situation.

Rating:
Summary: AWESOME!!
Review: I'm an 11th grader, and I first read this book in the 10th grade as a choice for independent reading. It was the only novel I read all year that didn't _feel_ like a requirement. It was awesome, and I think people who think it was boring should reconsider. I also heard some people say it was hard to follow, but I think this would only be true if you were quite simple. The layout and format make the novel more intriguing. It's interesting to see how the views of the moms and daughters differ, but like Jing-Mei says of her piano pieces, "[they are] two halves of the same song".

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Summary: Skillfully crafted, but overbaked with proverbs
Review: The Joy Luck Club has many fine moments. Several of the stories achieve a kind of wholeness in illustrating the characters' modern day struggles against the painful failures of the past. Amy Tan crafts an interesting structure that holds up well as a novel even though the plot itself is advanced though interlocking stories. Waverly Jong, for example, grows up to become a Chinatown chess prodigy against the backdrop of her mother's arrogant pride. It is a pride built on wanting her daughter to "have the best circumstances, the best characer, "and realizing, slowly, that she cannot will this to happen." Waverly gets written up as a prodigy in Life magazine, then quits playing to spite her mother, then attempts a return. Ultimately she fails. When she quits for good at age 14, her mother never mentions it again. Clearly, there is failure on both sides of this divide. A hundred pages later, Waverly's mother retells her own story of first coming to America, shuffling through immigrant job ads and ultimately landing in a Chinese cookie factory. She suffers the death of a son in America. On a trip back to China, she realizes she is no longer 100% Chinese. The natives can see this in her clothes and she can see it in her own face. She has lost part of her Chinese-ness. "What did I lose?" she wonders. "What did I get back in return?" The strengths of this novel are often undercut by Tan's reliance on proverbs and folk tales. The mothers are most prodigious here, frequently retelling stories of ancestral spirits, bad luck mysticism, and other sensations that (we are told) only Chinese people can feel. Some of these references work, many do not. The Joy Luck Club is a novel of flashbacks and retold history, but the strengths of this book are most consistently found in the retelling of what really happened between mothers, daughters and collapsing families. The allegories and proverbs take away from the characters. They are too often used as a convenient cover to see through a situation. At its best, Tan's writing excells in portraying simple events in a manner that teases out the underlying conflict. At other times, the writing bogs down with folkish tidbits.

Rating:
Summary: Don't award writers for over-sensationalizing reality!
Review: I guess it's politically correct for me to say this since I am Chinese. Frankly, I think many ethnic writers, including Ms. Tan, sensationalize their cultural backgrounds to get themselves on the top-selling lists. Tan's portrayal of Chinese characters are real only to those with a vague understanding of Asian Americans, people whose sole judgement are based on stereotypes and who actually think that Chinese people speak in cheesy metaphors, such as "Tigers waiting in trees." I do wonder how deep an understanding Ms. Tan has for Chinese culture herself...

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Summary: 4 Traditional Women Facing Hardships w Americanized Daughter
Review: First of all I gave this book a 2 star because the book talks too much about women and the point of view or the person telling the story shifts back and forth so it makes the book very confusing to follow. The story is about 4 women from China during the time when China was invaded by the Japanese. The four women and thier families had to go through lots of suffereings and they finally decided to go to America. In America the 4 women each has a daughter and they all become americanized. The four women wanted to keep the Chinese tradition so they made up the Joy Luck Club to have little get togethers where they would enjoy eaches company. The story sounded really interesting; however, it is really boring because it deals too much with women issues.

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Summary: It's all a matter of perception
Review: I read and loved Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club, and was curious about what other readers felt about the book. The most stark difference seems to be between the average (and predominantly non-Chinese) reader who loves the book, and other, mostly Chinese reviewers who think that the book paints a non-authentic picture of China. The truth is probably that this is the "real China" that Tan herself knew. I am a student who did a project on her books, and I learnt that her mother had an extremely harrowing life in China before she fled for America. The book, after all, is not an attempt to depict universal Chinese life, but only a slice of Chinese reality. I say this with no real authority on either Chinese or American people, but from an understanding which arises out of being Indian. India has always been another of those countries whose depiction in novels has been arguably authentic. A vast majority of Indians argue that the India portrayed in fiction (even those by Indian authors or non resident Indians) is heavily romanticized and almost archaic. I tend to agree with this view sometimes, especially when I meet non-Indians who have read these books and who otherwise have no real knowledge about my country. They seem to think that it's inhabitatted mainly by elephants, saints and snake-charmers! On the opposite side of the spectrum are those books that depict India as an epitomization of dirt and corruption. The country as I know it, however, is different. It may still retain some of the customs people have heard about, or even the corruption. But it's essence lies elsewhere and only living in the country can lead to this understanding. What I've realized, though, is that just because this is an India I don't recognize in full, it doesn't mean it's non-existant. This is the India the writer wants to write about. The reason I'm saying all this preachy and apparently incosequential stuff about my country is only because I think it is similar to the chinese situation. Joy Luck Club is a beautiful book, if not for anything else, then atleast for it's narrative style. But my advice to readers would be : don't let this book, or any other book on ethnic cultures, influence your perception of the country as a whole. Only seeing is really believing.

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Summary: an epic story
Review: well, I saw the movie and the book and all of them were very well writen and exciting. This book was the story of a epic struggle of three women during the hard times of war and poverty... Every nation had there shares of hard times but china had one of the worse. I really enjoyed every moment of it. i think everyone should read this book young and old, because it really teaches alot of morals.

Rating:
Summary: It's so good that while reading it, I felt like I was in Chi
Review: The first time I read it, it was so good that I had to go and get the movie. I can relate to the story so well that I can understand and feel for the characters while reading it. It's more than just a feeling, it's more like I am actually listenting to them. I have read it four times and every time I find new facinating details that I have not read before.

Rating:
Summary: Brilliant especially for a first novel.
Review: Ms. Tan's control of point of view is truly remarkable. Other authors write multiple viewpoint novels, and some of those Russian guys, Fyodor and Leo especially, are amazing. But Tan does something here that really deserves note. She actually offers the interior monologues of seven different characters and makes each of those voices distinct. This is really amazing. Try it some time. Try to use the first person perspective to reveal just two or three--let alone seven!!!!--distinct voices, with quirks and mannerisms and rhetorics of their own. And she doesn't just take you into the different characters' heads, she also makes you cheer for them in their conflicts every time, even when their interests conflict. THAT level of reader identification is hard enough to achieve without absolutely demonizing the conventionalized "villian" of the piece, and her ability to do it with so many characters is breathtaking and alone would make this an awesome book. The stories that illustrate the spirits she wishes to show us (and celebrate) are compelling in and of themselves. I loved it, obviously.