130 pages in; boring.

1912, Shanghái. Violeta es la hija adolescente de Lulú, una estadounidense propietaria de la mejor casa de cortesanas de la ciudad. Siempre a cabal lo entre dos mundos, y viendo cómo Lulú evita hablar del pasado, Violeta no acaba de encontrar su lugar, y está convencida de que su madre no la quiere. Pero antes de que puedan arreglar sus diferencias ambas serán víctimas de un engaño que las separará, llevando a Lulú de vuelta a San Francisco y convirtiendo a Violeta en cortesana. Años después, y como si el destino fuera una condena a la que no pueden escapar, Violeta sufrirá también los reveses de la suerte, y se dará cuenta de que su única oportunidad de encontrar la felicidad pasa por enfrentarse al pasado, compartir sus secretos y profundizar en la complejarelación entre madres e hijas.

( )

I love the way Amy Tan is able to meld the western and eastern cultures into a complete tapestry. This is a journey that you take with the characters, feeling every step is your own. Much of the book had common threads with "Memoirs of a Geisha" (another favorite book of mine), and I was fearful that it would fail to have a character of its own. After reading the entire book, I was wrong. ( )

I loved The Joy Luck Club| and The Kitchen God's Wife and was very excited to find this book at a library sale.

Since I always seem to start out with the negatives, I want to say that there was a lot here that I loved. As with the other two books of Tan's that I've read, there's a fantastic cast of well-structured characters, some of them almost mythical in their story lines (like Madam Li and Perpetual). The world building is beautifully thorough as well: though I know next to nothing about early-twentieth-century Shanghai, I felt as though I could clearly envision the worlds that Lulu and Violent walked through. (Granted, my few childhood years in Singapore probably give me more of a leg up in the mind's eye than most people get.)

Part of what I loved about the previous two Amy Tan novels I've read was the interaction between different generations of women from different cultures. The cover copy of this book promised "two women's intertwined fates" and "spanning more than forty years and two continents", but we only had Violet's point of view for the first 432 pages! An occasional side trip for a story from a secondary character's perspective did help keep from bogging down--Magic Gourd's whole chapter, "Etiquette for Beauties of the Boudoir," was a definite highlight. I was a bit sad that after over 500 pages, we didn't get this kind of dedication to Flora's story--just a few pages of monologue that didn't feel as real as anyone else's.

My chief complaint, though, was how bleak the book was overall. Children with good lives hated their parents. Day-to-day life, which might have offered chance for everyday humor or simple pleasures, was skipped over quickly. We didn't learn much about how Violet adjusted to her fate, what her lessons were like, how she felt about taking different men as lovers.

I almost gave up around the middle, but I held out for the things I loved in Tan's other writing--and sure enough, they appeared. At Violet's bleakest moment, she forges a new bond and finally makes a desperate plan to escape--something I'd been waiting for since the beginning. Her experience with other women, her coming into her own, her finally starting to reach out to others made the rest of the upper-side-of-average book worth it.

From an editorial standpoint, I do wish we could have had more of the Minturn women interwoven with the others. I'm heavily biased toward the structure of The Joy Luck Club--it was one of the first books I read that wasn't a straight-to-the-end narrative. While I don't think the suspense would have held as neatly with Lulu's story appearing sooner, I do think it would help resolve some of the disconnect between the love she expresses for her daughter in her section and the great dearth of it that Violet reports. Surely some of Lulu's gestures would have come across even the most petulant child's self-centeredness? And why would Lulu give her daughter amber, the symbol of her hatred for her own mother?

I'm glad I got to read Amy Tan's latest book, and I look forward to chipping away at her previous novels as well...but I'll be leaving this book at the office for someone else to enjoy rather than keeping it in my hoard. ( )