Loos, Pamela. A Reader’s Guide to Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club.
Enslow, 2008, 112p, $31.93, 978-0-7660-2832-6.
This reader’s guide to Amy Tan’s “The Joy Luck Club”, is an excellent companion to the book. It explores the complexity of the Chinese culture and opens a door to the world of their women. It also becomes a lens for the immigrant’s dream of becoming an American and having American born children. Beginning with her biography, Amy Tan shares with the reader her struggle in the American society and how her traditional parents got lost in the American way even as they embraced the concept.
Amy then translates this struggle beautifully in the book the Joy Luck Club. In choosing four young Chinese women and their mothers the reader gets a chance to see how the mothers took the opportunity to escape the China and with barely anything on their backs except their clothes they ran for freedom. As the story progresses we see how the mother’s life story brought them to despair and to the point of choosing to take a chance at a new life in a world that does not even speak their language. There are plenty of symbolisms, and family pride. And in this story the connection takes you back to China where the thread of family rejoins the American end bring it full circle.
This is a great resource for the teachers and the students. I suspect this book will help explain the book and have the students searching their book for answers to questions.
Includes: glossary, chronology, major works, bibliography, web sites and index. MD
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