The Joy Luck Club

By: Amy Tan

Narrated by: Gwendoline Yeo

For decades, a quartet of Chinese women who have emigrated to San Francisco gather to eat dim sum, play mahjong, and talk—they call themselves the Joy Luck Club. Over the years, their stories have informed the lives of four daughters who feel the weight of family and world history on their shoulders. With wit and sensitivity, this novel explores the deep, complicated, and sometimes painful connections between mothers and daughters. Amy Tan entices listeners to immerse themselves into the complex lives of these women.

©2008 Amy Tan (P)2008 Phoenix Books, Inc.

Beautiful story, so-so narrator

I loved Amy Tam's gorgeous prose. The linked stories were fascinating and slowly revealed the characters. The narrator grated at times. Her Chinese mom voices were good, but the American male characters all sounded like cartoonish buffoons and most of the daughters sounded like imbeciles. And she pronounced "librarian" "li-BARE-ian" and "sword" "SWW-ord." Irritating as all get out. Didn't ruin the book for me, but certain passages were hard to get through.

good story, but narrator makes distracting choices

I've read Joy Luck Club before and am pleased to find that it largely withstands the test of time.

The narrator of this audiobook, while great at creating subtly different voices for the mothers and daughters, frequently relies on caricature-ish to the point of stereotyped accents for side characters (sometimes with little justification - why use a "sing-song" Chinese accent when everyone in a particular chapter is Chinese in China speaking Chinese that is only translated for the reader's benefit). This frequently pulled me out of the read and felt like a distraction.

An interesting snapshot of culture and language

As a student of the Chinese language, I really enjoyed this book. Learning more about Chinese (recent) history, culture, and the challenges immigrants face was really interesting and I thought the stories were well done even though it was a little hard to piece together who was who at times.

My biggest issue with this version was the voices. Every American voice sounds like a dumb valley girl. Many of the older Chinese women’s voices sounds like a witch. I would be interested to know if the author intended for the “voices” to be “heard” this way with her text. I found it kind of obnoxious and over done and really took away from the story. But I wouldn’t say they are so bad that you shouldn’t read it if you are interested, just not one of the best available.

Lovely stories- looking forward to more!

I saw the movie before and loved it, and now love the book even more! Such a great book of generational culture and the relationships between mothers and their daughters. Very much looking forward to reading more of Amy Tan.

read the book

The story is truly wonderful but the narrator is terrible in many parts of the story