3.5 stars
I was a bit disappointed in this book. It's a really popular book and has gotten good reviews. It started out promising when the main character June finds out after her mother's death that the daughters her mother had from her previous life in China, are alive and want to meet her. June's mother had left the two girls under a tree while fleeing during the war, believing she was going to die. After being rescued, she was unable to find the girls.
I found this book very difficult to follow on audio. One minute, this seemed like a book with a normal plot, the next it starts rattling off short stories told by different characters which was hard to follow with the Chinese names. I wasn't sure who the story was referring to. The book finishes up with June finally meeting her long lost sisters in China. Although I found each of the short stories to be interesting, they didn't really garner any emotion from me because each was short and shallow, barely delving into the situation. This book would have been better told as a cohesive and fluent story instead of short fragments loosely related. Since half of the characters in this book were mothers who started their lives in China and then moved to America to have and raise their families, I assume the theme of the book was a sort of passing of the mothers' legacies to their daughters. June says after her mother's death that she didn't really know her mother, only to be refuted by the other women who told her how much she really did know her.
No comments:
Post a Comment