The Joy Luck Club

The Joy Luck Club

Author: Amy Tan

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2006-09-21

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 1101502738

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“The Joy Luck Club is one of my favorite books. From the moment I first started reading it, I knew it was going to be incredible. For me, it was one of those once-in-a-lifetime reading experiences that you cherish forever. It inspired me as a writer and still remains hugely inspirational.” —Kevin Kwan, author of Crazy Rich Asians Amy Tan’s beloved, New York Times bestselling tale of mothers and daughters, now the focus of a new documentary Amy Tan: Unintended Memoir on Netflix Four mothers, four daughters, four families whose histories shift with the four winds depending on who's "saying" the stories. In 1949 four Chinese women, recent immigrants to San Francisco, begin meeting to eat dim sum, play mahjong, and talk. United in shared unspeakable loss and hope, they call themselves the Joy Luck Club. Rather than sink into tragedy, they choose to gather to raise their spirits and money. "To despair was to wish back for something already lost. Or to prolong what was already unbearable." Forty years later the stories and history continue. 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.


CliffsNotes on Tan's The Joy Luck Club

CliffsNotes on Tan's The Joy Luck Club

Author: Laurie Neu Rozakis

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Published: 2007-08-20

Total Pages: 44

ISBN-13: 0544182367

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The original CliffsNotes study guides offer expert commentary on major themes, plots, characters, literary devices, and historical background. The latest generation of titles in this series also feature glossaries and visual elements that complement the classic, familiar format. Explore how generational and cultural differences can divide—and then unite—immigrant mothers and their American-born daughters as you study CliffsNotes on The Joy Luck Club. This novel describes the lives of four women, who fled China in the 1940s, and their contentious relationships with their four very Americanized daughters. Through the love of their mothers, each of these young women learns about her heritage and so is able to deal more effectively with her life. CliffsNotes provides detailed plot summaries, critical commentaries, and a helpful character list to help you uncover all the insight this novel has to offer. Make studying easier with CliffsNotes on The Joy Luck Club. Other features include Critical essays A review section that tests your knowledge Background on the author, including career highlights Classic literature or modern-day treasure—you'll understand it all with expert information and insight from CliffsNotes study guides.


The Moon Lady

The Moon Lady

Author: Amy Tan

Publisher:

Published: 1992-01

Total Pages: 32

ISBN-13: 9780241132791

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Nai-nai tells her granddaughters the story of her outing, as a seven-year-old girl in China, to see the Moon Lady and be granted a secret wish. Suggested level: primary.


The Kitchen God's Wife

The Kitchen God's Wife

Author: Amy Tan

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2006-09-21

Total Pages: 418

ISBN-13: 110100715X

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"Remarkable...mesmerizing...compelling.... An entire world unfolds in Tolstoyan tide of event and detail....Give yourself over to the world Ms. Tan creates for you." —The New York Times Book Review Winnie and Helen have kept each other's worst secrets for more than fifty years. Now, because she believes she is dying, Helen wants to expose everything. And Winnie angrily determines that she must be the one to tell her daughter, Pearl, about the past—including the terrible truth even Helen does not know. And so begins Winnie's story of her life on a small island outside Shanghai in the 1920s, and other places in China during World War II, and traces the happy and desperate events that led to Winnie's coming to America in 1949. The Kitchen God's Wife is "a beautiful book" (Los Angeles Times) from the bestselling author of novels like The Joy Luck Club and The Backyard Bird Chronicles, and the memoir, Where the Past Begins.


Chinese Cinderella

Chinese Cinderella

Author: Adeline Yen Mah

Publisher: Laurel Leaf

Published: 2009-05-06

Total Pages: 226

ISBN-13: 0307482804

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More than 800,000 copies in print! From the author of critically acclaimed and bestselling memoir Falling Leaves, this is a poignant and moving true account of her childhood, growing up as an unloved daughter in 1940s China. A Chinese proverb says, "Falling leaves return to their roots." In her own courageous voice, Adeline Yen Mah returns to her roots to tell the story of her painful childhood and her ultimate triumph in the face of despair. Adeline's affluent, powerful family considers her bad luck after her mother dies giving birth to her, and life does not get any easier when her father remarries. Adeline and her siblings are subjected to the disdain of her stepmother, while her stepbrother and stepsister are spoiled with gifts and attention. Although Adeline wins prizes at school, they are not enough to compensate for what she really yearns for -- the love and understanding of her family. Like the classic Cinderella story, this powerful memoir is a moving story of resilience and hope. Includes an Author's Note, a 6-page photo insert, a historical note, and the Chinese text of the original Chinese Cinderella. A PW BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR AN ALA-YALSA BEST BOOK FOR YOUNG ADULTS “One of the most inspiring books I have ever read.” –The Guardian


The Hundred Secret Senses

The Hundred Secret Senses

Author: Amy Tan

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2010-12-28

Total Pages: 370

ISBN-13: 0143119087

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The "wisest and most captivating novel" (Boston Globe) from the author of the bestselling The Valley of Amazement and the new memoir Where the Past Begins Set in San Francisco and in a remote village of Southwestern China, Amy Tan's The Hundred Secret Senses is a tale of American assumptions shaken by Chinese ghosts and broadened with hope. In 1962, five-year-old Olivia meets the half-sister she never knew existed, eighteen-year-old Kwan from China, who sees ghosts with her "yin eyes." Decades later, Olivia describes her complicated relationship with her sister and her failing marriage, as Kwan reveals her story, sweeping the reader into the splendor and violence of mid-nineteenth century China. With her characteristic wisdom, grace, and humor, Tan conjures up a story of the inheritance of love, its secrets and senses, its illusions and truths.


We Should Never Meet

We Should Never Meet

Author: Aimee Phan

Publisher: Macmillan + ORM

Published: 2005-11-15

Total Pages: 263

ISBN-13: 1429941987

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Compelling, moving, and beautifully written, the interlinked stories that make up We Should Never Meet alternate between Saigon before the city's fall in 1975 and present-day "Little Saigon" in Southern California---exploring the reverberations of the Vietnam War in a completely new light. Intersecting the lives of eight characters across three decades and two continents, these stories dramatize the events of Operation Babylift, the U.S.-led evacuation of thousands of Vietnamese orphans to America just weeks before the fall of Saigon. Unwitting reminders of the war, these children were considered bui doi, the dust of life, and faced an uncertain, dangerous existence if left behind in Vietnam. Four of the stories follow the saga of one orphan's journey from the points-of-view of a teenage mother, a duck farmer and a Catholic nun from the Mekong Delta, a social worker in Saigon, and a volunteer doctor from America. The other four take place twenty years later and chronicle the lives of four Vietnamese orphans now living in America: Kim, an embittered Amerasian searching for her unknown mother; Vinh, her gang member ex-boyfriend who preys on Vietnamese families; Mai, an ambitious orphan who faces her emancipation from the American foster-care system; and Huan, an Amerasian adopted by a white family, who returns to Vietnam with his adoptive mother. We Should Never Meet is one of those rare books that truly takes an original look at the human condition---and marks the exciting debut of a major new writer for our time.


The Girl Who Wrote in Silk

The Girl Who Wrote in Silk

Author: Kelli Estes

Publisher: Sourcebooks, Inc.

Published: 2015-07-07

Total Pages: 398

ISBN-13: 1492608343

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A USA TODAY BESTSELLER! "A powerful debut that proves the threads that interweave our lives can withstand time and any tide, and bind our hearts forever."—Susanna Kearsley, New York Times bestselling author of Belleweather and The Vanished Days A historical novel inspired by true events, Kelli Estes's brilliant and atmospheric debut is a poignant tale of two women determined to do the right thing, highlighting the power of our own stories. The smallest items can hold centuries of secrets... While exploring her aunt's island estate, Inara Erickson is captivated by an elaborately stitched piece of fabric hidden in the house. The truth behind the silk sleeve dated back to 1886, when Mei Lien, the lone survivor of a cruel purge of the Chinese in Seattle found refuge on Orcas Island and shared her tragic experience by embroidering it. As Inara peels back layer upon layer of the centuries of secrets the sleeve holds, her life becomes interwoven with that of Mei Lein. Through the stories Mei Lein tells in silk, Inara uncovers a tragic truth that will shake her family to its core—and force her to make an impossible choice. Should she bring shame to her family and risk everything by telling the truth, or tell no one and dishonor Mei Lien's memory? A touching and tender book for fans of Marie Benedict, Susanna Kearsley, and Duncan Jepson, The Girl Who Wrote in Silk is a dual-time period novel that explores how a delicate piece of silk interweaves the past and the present, reminding us that today's actions have far reaching implications. Praise for The Girl Who Wrote in Silk: "A beautiful, elegiac novel, as finely and delicately woven as the title suggests. Kelli Estes spins a spellbinding tale that illuminates the past in all its brutality and beauty, and the humanity that binds us all together." —Susan Wiggs, New York Times bestselling author of The Beekeeper's Ball "A touching and tender story about discovering the past to bring peace to the present." —Duncan Jepson, author of All the Flowers in Shanghai "Vibrant and tragic, The Girl Who Wrote in Silk explores a horrific, little-known era in our nation's history. Estes sensitively alternates between Mei Lien, a young Chinese-American girl who lived in the late 1800s, and Inara, a modern recent college grad who sets Mei Lien's story free." —Margaret Dilloway, author of How to Be an American Housewife and Sisters of Heart and Snow


The Last Town

The Last Town

Author: Blake Crouch

Publisher: Ballantine Books

Published: 2022-10-18

Total Pages: 321

ISBN-13: 0593598512

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The final book of the smash-hit Wayward Pines trilogy from the New York Times bestselling author of Dark Matter, Recursion, and Upgrade What’s inside was a nightmare. What’s outside is a thousand times worse. Welcome to Wayward Pines, the last town. Secret Service agent Ethan Burke arrived in Wayward Pines, Idaho, three weeks ago. In this town, people are told who to marry, where to live, where to work. No one is allowed to leave; even asking questions can get you killed. But Ethan has discovered the astonishing secret of what lies beyond the electrified fence that surrounds Wayward Pines and protects it from the terrifying world beyond. And now that secret is about to come storming through the fence to wipe out this last, fragile remnant of humanity. The Last Town at last pitches Ethan Burke and his fellow residents into all-out war against the forces outside the town’s gates—and in doing so delivers every bit the riotously horrific, breathlessly action-packed conclusion that the Wayward Pines trilogy deserves.