Kitchen God's Wife

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Summary: The Kitchen God's Wife is a novel fulled with secerts.
Review: The Kitchen God's Wife by Amy Tan is a novel about two women, Winnie and Helen, who kept each other secerts for a long time. Winnie was forced by Helen to tell her worst secerts out to her daughter Pearl. What Pearl don't know was how bad those secerts and the truths are. This novel is mainly on Winnie's childhood and her adulthood in China. Her good and bad memories of her life and at the end, Pearl,too had a secert of her own to revel it to her mom

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Summary: Be emotionally transported by the writings of Amy Tan.
Review: Amy Tan has the power to transport her readers to another time and place with the depth of her descriptive writings. As I read this book, I was actually able to smell the food cooking and feel the weather as I became one with the characters. I read this book during a very difficult time in my life. I am grateful for the masterful writing skills of Amy Tan as I was able to escape into the story and forget the real world for a time

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Summary: How can her life be worse?
Review: The truth is that the first couple of chapters are not very exciting at all! Yet I can not put the book down when Winnie, the narrator of her own life in the book, began to reveal to her daughter, Pearl, that her mother disappeared, might have died, or ran away with another man, when she was at a very young age. When Winnie was about seventeen, she married Wen Fu, whom she discovered later to be a cruel, spoiled, and power thirsty man. The marriage turned out to be the worst nightmare of her life. She made the decision to gave up all the children from Wen Fu by abortion because she didn't want them to live under such a father. Then came the Japanese invasion into China, and this war gave her the chance to meet someone who truly loves her, and a chance to escape to a better life. The part I liked the most was the message behind Lady Sorrowfree. We should always keep in mind to have our "happiness winning our bitterness, no regrets in this world."

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Summary: I thought the book was a very emotionally and touching .
Review: I thought the book was very interesting and it kept me going every time i put the book i just want to pick it back up. the story is bacially on dealing with the hardship in life.how unhappy her life was in china

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Summary: A wife's view of marriage from China to the US
Review: Amy Tan's book "the Joy Luck Club" was about the relationships between mothers and daughters. "The Kitchen God's Wife" is about the relationships between husbands and wives. Amy Tan writes of the joys of newlyweds, the tragic death of children, the death of love from brutality and abuse, and 10,000 year old marriage laws. The heroine has courage, determination, bravery, and common sense; all the traits men never acknowledge. Favorite line: "We had hot and cold running servants."

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Summary: Entertaining, but Not as Good as Joy Luck Club
Review: Authors probably get very tired of seeing their books compared to their others. I can understand that. But I've only read two books by Amy Tan: "Joy Luck Club" and "The Kitchen God's Wife." I absolutely loved "Joy Luck Club," so I expected to fall in love with "Kitchen God" as well. But this time it just didn't happen for me.

There was a good amount of detail about Shanghai and Chinese history, which I thoroughly enjoyed. And the characters (especially the Chinese women, of course) were likable enough. The plot (mother has secrets/daughter has secrets) was okay too. But the secrets weren't all that astounding, so I felt the book let the reader down slightly in the end.

Bottom line: Good book, but if you had to choose only one Amy Tan, read "Joy Luck Club" instead.

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Summary: It's the characterization that gets me
Review: One thing I love is when a character or cast of characters captivate me. I can see them, I can hear them and I can sympathize with them. Amy Tan always produces this for me. As I understand it, this novel was loosely based on Amy's mother's life, making it all the more interesting and intriguing. I've read it at least 5 times and come away with something new and different with each reading.


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Summary: A much stronger dose of Joy Luck Club
Review: Amy Tan is a strong advocate of placing her craft before her heritage. This makes her a feminist writer who is Chinese, not a Chiense feminist writer. Even with this in mind, I still find a strong racial bias in her books.

Even though men only play secondary roles in her works, her preference of American males as protaganists to Chinese males is apparent in her debut novel, the Joy Luck club and more blantant in the Kitchen God's Wife. I used "American" instead of "white" because, this time, the male protaganist is a second-generation Chinese American who, aside from his blood, has very little Chinese left in him.

For those who are interested, Tan devoted quite some pages writing about how Chinese men have small genitals and cannot satisfy the "itch" of a WWII Chinese "relief woman". Whether this is based her observations or opinions, or just something to please the American audience, it represents a fundamental problem in her attitude. She got away with it simply because, in the face of feminism, racism becomes a lesser evil.

I read this book (and the Joy Luck Club) when I was in my last year of high school (that's almost 12 years ago), thinking that reading the works of a Chinese writer would make me understand more about my own people. At that time I was unaware of the implications of her writing. The more I think about it, the more I got angry, because she has just sold us (Chinese men) out in the name of feminism.

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Summary: EXCELLENT THO SOME MEN MAY NOT LIKE IT
Review: I won't describe the plot since many more have already done so. Some men may not like the book, since it is all from the viewpoint of women. But some men may like that as an insight into the female mind, as well as a culture they may know nothing about. No one says everything Amy Tan writes is fact, but I'm sure most of the situations in her books have happened to someone in China (and even all over the world). How much do we really think of what has happened to many immigrants all over the world? Not much, we cannot imagine. My own mother's father came to America before WWII, planning to work and to save money to bring over his wife and young child (my mother). They were Armenians, escaping from the oppression of being Christians who were driven out of their land and forced to live in Muslim countries. Many of my ancestors (both my father's and my mother's side) were killed in massacres. (My own father, as a little boy, hid on a rooftop when the Turks came to town and watched in horror as many in the town were run through with swords. There's another story, never told in detail.) Then the war broke out, and the wife, child and father were not reunited till seven years later. Can you imagine the pain and suffering in all of their lives? When they finally came to America they knew no English, had little if any money, and never saw the family members they left behind again. Can you imagine that? By the way, later the mother and father had two other children; the the mother was killed by an automobile. The father had to raise the 3 children by himself, and never married again. Can you imagine that too? Yet these stories happened by the thousands, by the millions. Only there were few Amy Tans to fill in the details of the stories so that you COULD imagine what happened.
What sets her writing apart is the deeply insightful, touching, emotional, and sensitive way she has of saying things. ALL women should like this book, most kids and some men, in my estimation. And young people, read the book, not the Cliff notes! Or you will rob yourself of a fantastic literary journey.

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Summary: A Sad Story, But Still A Goodie
Review: This story is about an abusive relationship, that's true. And Wen Fu is "two-dimensional". Also true. (Aren't all bullies?) But it's more than that. It's a story about sharing secrets. The daughter has a secret she SHOULD tell her mother. The mother has a secret she SHOULD tell her daughter. But neither one of them likes to communicate to the other--until a third party threatens to reveal their secrets FOR them should unless they do it themselvss.

Again, Amy Tan's books are about mothers and daughters, so the relationships of the men are put on the backburner. If stories about women and "woman power" just "isn't your thing", put it down and move on.

Still an amazing book!