jobinsonlis 's review for:

The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts by Maxine Hong Kingston

3.0

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I'm not 100% sure how I feel about this book. I found the author's raw anger pretty compelling but the book felt disjointed to me as a memoir. I never felt like I understood Kingston as well as I knew her mother because her mother seemed to be the focal point in most of the stories. I don't know that this is a failing necessarily because her mother was obviously one of the biggest forces in her life but for an autobiography, I don't feel like I've learned very much about the author. Also the front part was pretty loaded with mythology as it related to her life but it seemed to fade away a bit in the later sections where she's describing more plainly what was happening in California at that time. Which was a disappointment to me because I really like the first half more.