Name: Dreams of joy
Rating: 4.068181818181818 (22 reviews)
ISBN: 9781400067121

Lisa See

A continuation of "Shanghai Girls" finds a devastated Joy fleeing to China to search for her real father while her mother, Pearl, desperately pursues her, a dual quest marked by their encounters with the nation's intolerant Communist culture.

a novel

Dreams of joy

julia

I really liked this book. It was a very satisfying conclusion to Shanghai Girls. I felt the author did a very good job of portraying Communist China and the struggles of Joy and Pearl.

altlovesbooks

This will be a short review, mostly because there isn't a whole lot to really say about it that hasn't already been covered. Joy returns to China to seek her roots and her family, and gets wrapped up in all the fervor surrounding Red China in the late 1950s. She makes (many) poor decisions. Like mother, like daughter, I suppose.

Joy spends most of the book being an unreliable narrator, where her poor decision-making skills are buried in her optimism and intentionally only seeing things at the commune she lives at in China the way she wants them to be seen. She genuinely seems to believe everything she's being told at the commune, which seems like a strange departure from the confident, world-experienced college student she was portrayed to be in the first book. Everything that happened to her felt very much contingent on her remaining (willingly or otherwise) oblivious to what's going on around her, and it was hard to really feel bad for her because of it.

I'm glad I read the book to wrap up the events from Shanghai Girls, but ultimately neither book really felt really solid to me.

Jessica Smith

See's books are always really enjoyable, and this is no exception. If you've read 'Shanghai Girls', it's almost a requirement to read this. It's very different, being set in Maoist China instead of the US, but just as historically rich. See offers us a fair and critical view of this period of Chinese history, with an afterword somberly informing us that 45 million people died in the Great Leap Forward, at best estimate. It's also refreshing to read a novel that doesn't shy away from mentioning "feminine hygiene".

Dreams of joy a novel

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