Dreams of Joy

This book packs an even bigger punch than its predecessor. While Pearh and May had their share of ordeals in their youth (and even adulthood) Joy has learned the hard way that Chairman Mao was not as good a leader as he should have been.

The Great Leap Forward was an absolute fucking disaster. When it causes famine and untold deaths, yeah, it's going down in history as a horrendous example of ignorance in the hands of those who are responsible for the people. This nationwide program is experienced by Joy, who experiences China before the Great Leap Forward. Despite certain difficulties, life is still relatively fine and there is plenty to eat. But when the Great Leap Forward was instated, God help all them poor bastards.

Reading about the show more Great Leap through the eyes of (mostly one person) really helps to paint a picture of why it was such a failure, and how the government got away with instituting it in the first place. I sincerely hope there is a third book to this story. show less

Author Lisa See has always been able to completely draw me into her stories and when I emerge days later, I am often emotional wrung out but deeply satisfied with the story and what I have learned from her writing. Dreams of Joy is no exception, this is a follow up book to her Shanghai Girls, and the story picks up right from the end of the first book. Joy is the 19 year old American raised daughter of a woman who she has just found out is not her birth mother. In fact, her mother, Pearl, is actually her aunt, and her aunt May, is in fact, her birth mother. On top of this, Joy is still in shock from her father’s suicide, of which, she blames herself for. In true teenage style, Joy runs. Unfortunately she runs to Communist China in show more search of her birth father. At her young and impressionable age, she also believes in the revolution and wants to join in and help with the “Great Leap Forward “ program. It’s 1957 and Joy arrives in China on the eve of the Cultural Revolution.

It took me awhile to warm up to the character of Joy. In the beginning parts of the book I simply wanted to shake her and tell her to smarten up. She made impulsive, wrong choices again and again, but as the story develops, Joy matures and by the middle of the book, I found her a very sympathetic character. Although Pearl was not the birth mother, her actions and sacrifices show that she was truly Joy’s mother I haven’t read a lot about China in the late 1950’s, but the brutal conditions described in the story were both horrifying and moving.

That Lisa See has done a lot of research into the subject matter is obvious and even though there is violence aplenty in the story I never felt it was overdone or exaggerated. Dreams of Joy is an excellent story but also paints a strong picture of both the political and social attitudes of Red China during this time. An excellent sequel. show less

Dreams of Joy is Lisa See’s sequel to Shanghai Girls, but that isn’t really what it is...it is really the completion of what was, for me, an incomplete story. It would be like having Gone With the Wind end when Scarlett gets back to Tara after the burning of Atlanta...you would feel cheated, because you would know there were a lot of important pieces of this story that you didn’t yet know. It just couldn’t have ended there. Everything truly important happens in GWTW after that point, your understanding of the characters comes from Scarlett’s efforts to rebuild her lost world...the second half is the crux. That is how I feel about what Dreams of Joy is to Shanghai Girls.

This was a powerful novel with an in-depth look at life show more inside Communist China in the early days of Mao. It is also a serious examination of love: love of country, love of family, love of a mother, love of a lover, and what it is to sacrifice for each of those loves. It was interesting to see the growth of these characters over the course of the books, especially Pearl, who has to deal with her role as a mother and a sister in ways that she never expected to, and in doing so is forced to see herself in a clearer light than is comfortable.

Taken together, Shanghai Girls and Dreams of Joy are a great reading experience. They reach a level that neither of them could achieve alone. I was vaguely disappointed at the end of Shanghai Girls, but that was completely erased upon reading Dreams of Joy. I will now feel good about reading Lisa See’s other books. I still won’t rate her quite up there with Amy Tan’s early work, but she comes closer than I had thought. show less

Written in the first person by a mother and daughter, this tells of family strife and what you would do for those you love.
Joy is the daughter of Chinese immigrants to the US, although at the opening of the book she's discovered that she is, in fact, the biological daughter of her aunt. She's also 19 and incredibly naive and idealistic. In a fit of teenage tantrum, she runs away to China to find her real father and live the socialist dream.

It doesn't quite work out like that.

Joy's (upbringing) mother Pearl left China years ago, but steels herself to go back and find her daughter and bring her back to the US again. Along the way she discovers that life isn't always what you expect.

I struggled with this. It is the second book of a show more series, and there were times when I felt I'd missed something, but those were relatively few. I just didn't understand Joy at all. I can't remember ever being that idealistic and found her hard to fathom. At times it felt she was cutting of her nose just to spite her mother. Joy seemed far more rational. But the story didn't ever move me, and it had a rather over blown quality about it, as if the hardships had to be so extreme that you could never imagine anything worse - and in that way the book lost a certain credibility. It discusses propaganda a lot, how what the people were told differed from what they experienced. This had that same air of unreality to me. I'm not trying to say that the experiences of people at that time weren't this hard, just that the depiction of them in this book didn't ring true in the telling.

I found the chapters written by the two women difficult to distinguish, as I felt neither had an individual voice. If I hadn't looks at who was speaking I'm not sure I'd have known from the text. And when the two women have very different upbringings ages & experiences, surely they would speak in a very different manner.

Strikes me as a book some people would love - but not me. show less

Dreams of Joy is a history lesson and a "rough awakening" story of a young Chinese-American woman who leaves her family in California, USA, to run off to China while it's in the throes of becoming a Maoist nation. Much more intense and interesting than its prequel Shanghai Girls in which we followed the lives of sisters Pearl and May, here we follow Pearl's daughter Joy as she searches for her identity after learning some uncomfortable truths about her mother, her aunt, and her father. Joy's energy is totally consumed by embracing the idealism of growing communism in the Green Dragon, a collective of the "New" China.

I loved all the historical and cultural details which infused life and meaning into its characters. Conversely, I was show more appalled by the frightening description of daily life as food became increasingly scarce in the collective. This novel was very exciting even though its ending seemed a bit too contrived. My overall impression was that this was a worthwhile read, mostly for its picture of how the Chinese population endured the grim years of the Great Leap Forward. Its message also left me deeply thankful for the many freedoms I have in my own life and in my own country. show less

I knew [b:Shanghai Girls|5960325|Shanghai Girls|Lisa See|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1255570412s/5960325.jpg|5991850] didn't seem finished, so was excited to read this sequel. The historical setting -- China during Mao's "Great Leap Forward" -- is fascinating, bringing to the catastrophic consequences of collectivization to life. Joy, the title character, is a Chinese-American college drop-out, who has run away to China to find her newly revealed biological father and help build Communist China. I wanted to beat her with The Little Red Book as she refused to listen to any of the parental figures who tried to tell her that Mao's China was no utopia. Eventually, of course, even she can't ignore the glaring hypocrisy and starvation show more around her, but by then all kinds of complications have arisen. I thought the ending See created was a bit overly complicated, but it allowed her to weave all the little threads in exactly where she wanted them. show less

This is the sequel to Lisa See's Shanghai Girls, which ends on a cliffhanger when daughter, Joy, runs away from problems at home. She idealistically heads to Communist China of the 50's to help build a new country during Chairman Mao Tse-Tung's Great Leap Forward.

I’ve enjoyed Lisa See’s portraits of life in China in her other books and this one is no different. It is filled with well-researched details of life in the beginning of Mao’s regime. We see China from the viewpoints of one of Mao’s elite artists, average city dwellers in Shanghai and peasant workers on a farming collective. It is one of the most vivid descriptions of the resulting famine that I have ever read.

The novel has enough twists to be a page turner, although show more like other reviewers, I felt the happily ever after ending a bit contrived. Recommended for those interested in historical novels or China. I would suggest reading Shanghai Girls first.

I listened to this on audiobook and was not fond of the reader. The book is very long—13 hours-- and the reader chose to read at least half of it in a strained, tear-laden voice. It’s an emotional book with stressful incidents in the characters’ lives, but 6 hours of someone fighting back tears is waaaaaay too much. show less