Take a photo of a barcode or cover
3.68 AVERAGE
3.68 AVERAGE
Just couldn't get through it. Felt too much like junior high homework.
The writing style is much different than what is considered normal or expected, but I don’t think that is a bad thing by any means; I always enjoy reading from different styles. That being said, I believe that to follow the book’s story requires a constant open mind. I think the complicated style was meant to be a push against the status quo of western books — which, in this regard, it certainly is.
sad
medium-paced
challenging
emotional
slow-paced
This was so intense and visceral. I’ve never read anything like it. Daily life is instilled with the exact same raw energy as epic tales of battles and warriors. Maxine Hong Kingston is a true virtuoso. I couldn’t put this down.
challenging
emotional
slow-paced
reflective
tense
slow-paced
This book bends genre like nobody's business, and I love it. On this edition, the front announces that it won an award for memoir, and the back of the book directs booksellers to shelve it in the fiction section. Yes!
Maxine Hong Kingston weaves the stories of her childhood in with imagined stories, Chinese myths, and tales that her mother has told her. The landscape she creates is one that is very true to childhood. Children, after all, do not make any kind of strict distinction between "reality" and "fantasy."
Maxine Hong Kingston weaves the stories of her childhood in with imagined stories, Chinese myths, and tales that her mother has told her. The landscape she creates is one that is very true to childhood. Children, after all, do not make any kind of strict distinction between "reality" and "fantasy."
“You must not tell anyone,” my mother said, “what I am about to tell you. In China your father had a sister who killed herself. She jumped into the family well. We say that your father has all brothers because it is as if she had never been born.
The villagers punished her for acting as if she could have a private life, secret and apart from them.
“Bad girl,” my mother yelled, and sometimes that made me gloat rather than cry. Isn’t a bad girl almost a boy?
Nobody supports me at the expense of his own adventure. Then I get bitter: no one supports me; I am not loved enough to be supported. That I am not a burden has to compensate for the sad envy when I look at women loved enough to be supported.
Perhaps human beings just die, and that’s the end. I don’t think I’d mind that too much. Which would you rather be? A ghost who is constantly wanting to be fed? Or nothing?
Like the dragons living in temple eaves, my mother looked down on plain people who were lonely and afraid.
“Why didn’t you write to tell her once and for all you weren’t coming back and you weren’t sending for her?” Brave Orchid asked.
“I don’t know,” he said. “It’s as if I had turned into a different person. The new life around me was so complete; it pulled me away. You became people in a book I had read a long time ago.”
Ha! You can’t stop me from talking. You tried to cut off my tongue, but it didn’t work.
challenging
emotional
reflective
tense
medium-paced
Content Warnings
Graphic: Animal cruelty, Animal death, Child death, Misogyny