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lelia_t 's review for:
The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts
by Maxine Hong Kingston
I think I’d have to read this book many times to fully absorb it, but one of the things I love is how, despite the fact that women are so poorly regarded, the real powerhouse in the family is the narrator’s mother. She shapes the narrator’s life and understanding through the stories she tells, even having an almost Tom Sawyer-like love of invention when she’s imagining the possible scenarios that await her recently-immigrated sister. Kingston makes a very layered exploration of the power of story to shape reality and to both control others and empower them. One of the challenges the narrator faces is to develop her own voice so it’s strong enough to hold its own next to her mother’s. I love that she does so in such a way that she honors her mother’s and her own experiences, using story to connect to her lineage and strength. And I love the way both she and her mother use myth to expand their sense of themselves as individuals. Azar Nafisi has a great line in Reading Lolita in Tehran that I thought was applicable here: “Every fairy tale offers the potential to surpass present limits.”