Title: The Joy Luck Club
First published: May 23, 2003
Description: Four mothers, four daughters, four families, whose histories shift with the four winds depending on who's telling the stories. In 1949, four Chinese women, recent immigrants to San Francisco, meet weekly to play mahjong and tell stories of what they left behind in China. United in loss and new hope for their daughters' futures, they call themselves the Joy Luck Club. Their daughters, who have never heard these stories, think their mothers' advice is irrelevant to their modern American lives – until their own inner crises reveal how much they've unknowingly inherited of their mothers' pasts. 

With wit and sensitivity, Amy Tan examines the sometimes painful, often tender, and always deep connection between mothers and daughters. As each woman reveals her secrets, trying to unravel the truth about her life, the strings become more tangled, more entwined. Mothers boast or despair over daughters, and daughters roll their eyes even as they feel the inextricable tightening of their matriarchal ties. Tan is an astute storyteller, enticing readers to immerse themselves into these lives of complexity and mystery.
Subjects: Chinese American, Chinese American women, Chinese American women in fiction, Chinese Americans, Chinese Americans in fiction, Death, Female friendship, Female friendship in fiction, Fiction, Literature, Loss (Psychology), Mothers, Mothers and daughters, Mothers and daughters in fiction, Mothers in fiction, Reminiscing in old age, Reminiscing in old age in fiction, Societies and clubs, Women, Women in fiction, California, San Francisco (Calif.), Asian Americans, Mother and child, Littérature américaine, Auteurs d'origine chinoise, open_syllabus_project, Reading Level-Grade 11, Reading Level-Grade 10, Reading Level-Grade 12, Fiction, family life, Friendship, fiction, San francisco (calif.), fiction, Mothers and daughters, fiction, Chinese americans, fiction, Fiction, psychological, Large type books, Fiction, family life, general, Fiction, sagas, Fictional Works [Publication Type], Asian American, Literary, Sagas, Autographed books, Ficción, Novela hogareña, Mujeres chino-americanas, Madre e hija, Drama, Chinese American families, Madres e hijas, Novela
Places: San Francisco (Calif.), United States
Time periods: 20th century
LC classification: PS