UNDERSTANDING & PRODUCING WRITTEN ENGLISH I

Book Review

The Joy Luck Club

The Joy Luck Club is a collection of short stories, arranged into chapters with an individual theme - love. The mothers and daughters have extremely different outlooks on life, which are shown though the chapters from their own perspective. These outlooks and different perspectives add to the depth of the cultural conflict between the American daughters and Chinese mothers. Each chapter can be looked at as a separate story, but the book still floes together beautifully.

The four daughters’ stories involve the ways that their mothers raised them, and how it has affected them as adults. While their experiences are, for the most part, far less traumatic than their mother's, they have hard times as well. All of them have problems understanding their parents, who try to raise them with the same guidelines with which they were raised, but with the sense of American pride and self-worth. Nonetheless, all of the daughters interpret their mother's pressure the wrong way. They feel that they are a constant disappointment to their mothers. Unfortunately, they do not realize that their mother's constant pressure and subtleties in behavior happen because their mothers want to show that they love them. This novel shows how important it is to know your mother, before it is too late.

I think that we can all agree that sometimes it's nearly impossible to communicate with others, especially, when that person is one of your parents. One of the main themes and concepts of this wonderful novel is that you must understand your mother and your past before you can understand yourself, and that you must never doubt your own self-worth.

The author's writing style is very refreshing. If one of the mothers was talking, the writing would be in broken English, which contributed to the character's voice. Everything about this piece made it seem real. The word choice and sentence structure varied with each character. If that particular character had high English skills, then it would be displayed by good vocabulary and sentence structure. I felt that this author did an amazing job with flashbacks.

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