YOUth Review: The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan

The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan is a fiction novel following four families living in San Francisco. The four mothers of the family immigrated to the United States of America from China for the chance of a better life for their children. The four daughters are the children of each of the mothers. After the mothers arrived in San Francisco they started a club where they played Mahjong, a Chinese game, and shared food. The novel itself is structured like a game of Mahjong, divided into four sections which are then divided into four more sections, making 16 chapters total. Each of the four sections focuses on the mother’s stories or the daughter’s stories, two sections focus on the mothers, and two on the daughters. In these sections, the mothers share the stories of their lives back in China and their lives in America and the daughters share stories of their childhoods being children of immigrants and their adult lives.

I really liked The Joy Luck Club as it felt very easy to read and hard to put down. The way the book is structured not only makes sense in terms of the narrative of the novel but also makes it very easy to read. It’s very easy to read one chapter and then take a break because each chapter tells a different story of either one of the four mothers or one of the four daughters. The way Amy Tan wrote each of the characters made each of them stand out and made me interested in their stories. The stories themselves were also very interesting, showing how the mothers’ lives have changed since moving from China to America. The Joy Luck Club is a terrific novel that made me emotionally connect with each of the characters. I would definitely recommend it to anyone looking for a novel about family.

-Aiden