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3.68 AVERAGE
3.68 AVERAGE
So glad I finally got around to reading this classic! It does one of the many things I love about memoirs where it blurs memory and stories and muddies the water of what's real and what's stories and whose memories belong to who.
emotional
reflective
medium-paced
dark
emotional
inspiring
reflective
slow-paced
challenging
emotional
reflective
medium-paced
challenging
emotional
reflective
slow-paced
i was so unfair to this book as a dumb high schooler, but now rereading it as an adult with more of an awareness of its place and significance in asian-american lit, i gotta say... nice
dark
emotional
reflective
slow-paced
dark
emotional
mysterious
reflective
sad
medium-paced
I wish I liked this book more, but it just never quite cohered for me. I think the idea of mixing fiction and memoir is compelling, but in practice I think it muddies the message of the book more than it strengthens it. My favorite moments were the ones grounded the most in reality: the fights between mother and daughter, the harrowing scene of bullying in the final fourth, etc. Kingston really taps into something raw and personal, and the critiques leveled at patriarchal Chinese culture are powerful and delivered well. Still, my former complaints, combined with some second-wave feminist ideas throughout the novel that have aged kind of poorly, made this book a somewhat difficult read for me.