This is my least favorite Amy Tan book so far. Though the beginning of the book linked the mothers and their daughters through the Joy Luck Club, it seemed that the stories were not even connected to each other through most of the book. I had to keep referring back to the beginning to see whose daughter or whose mother was telling each story. The stories themselves were not bad, but it was almost like reading a book of short stories for me instead of reading stories that were connected as part of a longer book. I'm not a fan of short stories, so the format of this book made it much less interesting to me. ( )

I am the mother of two teenage girls. I am also a daughter. This means that the whole mother-daughter relationship is one that I have given a lot of thought and energy. Being where I am in my life, I read The Joy Luck Club with a very different perspective from the time I first read it.

Jing-Mei Woo learns that her mother had a family before the one she has now, complete with a soldier husband and twin baby girls. With the war in China bringing such danger and uncertainty, her mother takes her babies and flees into the countryside. But her strength begins to fail and she makes the difficult decision to leave the girls, along with everything she owns, and hopes that someone will find them and take care of them.

But life doesn't work the way she expected. She survives. For years, she knows nothing about the fate of her daughters. She remarries and has another baby daughter. Then she learns that her twins have survived. She tries to contact them, she plans a visit. But she dies before she can make that trip.

All of this takes place early in the book. The rest of the book focuses on lives of 8 women, mothers and daughters. The mothers have lives and stories to tell that their daughters have never heard.

I enjoyed this book, if it was not quite so emotional for me as it was the first time I read it. Instead it just reminded me of how complicated this relationship is and how much I need to work on it. ( )

This is both a moving story about the relationships between Mothers and Daughters and also a tale of just how much a heritage can shape who and what you are. Amy Tan's writing is very fluid and though the narrative moves between 4 different sets of mothers and daughters she never loses you. ( )

I fell in love with this book the minute I started reading it. Tan has such a talent not only for depicting mother/daughter relationships, but also for making Asian and Asian-American culture accessible to those not part of it. ( )

I loved this book. It was so beautifully written. All of the stories tied together wonderfully. I liked how each story could also be read seperately also and no other context was needed. Usually I am not a huge short story fan, but this was just fantastic. In my copy of the book it has a chart listing the mothers and the daughters and that helped tie everything together for me. I also loved how the first story and the last story just tied the whole book together in such a wonderful way. ( )