catherine_the_greatest 's review for:

Dreams of Joy by Lisa See

4.0

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I knew [b:Shanghai Girls|5960325|Shanghai Girls|Lisa See|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1255570412s/5960325.jpg|5991850] didn't seem finished, so was excited to read this sequel. The historical setting -- China during Mao's "Great Leap Forward" -- is fascinating, bringing to the catastrophic consequences of collectivization to life. Joy, the title character, is a Chinese-American college drop-out, who has run away to China to find her newly revealed biological father and help build Communist China. I wanted to beat her with The Little Red Book as she refused to listen to any of the parental figures who tried to tell her that Mao's China was no utopia. Eventually, of course, even she can't ignore the glaring hypocrisy and starvation around her, but by then all kinds of complications have arisen. I thought the ending See created was a bit overly complicated, but it allowed her to weave all the little threads in exactly where she wanted them.