A review by lydiainspace
The Kitchen God's Wife by Amy Tan

challenging emotional informative sad medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Plot
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.5

Like any Amy Tan book, The Kitchen God's Wife is about mother-daughter relationships, the unreliability of memory, and the invention and continuation of culture. This story specifically deals with women's independence, and how the Chinese women in the story choose many different paths to emancipate themselves from the men who hold the reigns to their futures. I found it to be thematically similar to The Bonesetter's Daughter, but worthy of a read in it's own right. Though I enjoyed many aspects of the book, the choice to make the middle 4/5ths an uninterrupted narration of the mother's life felt poorly paced to me.
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