Book Recommendations Vol. 2
Submitted by Grace Zhang
The Joy Luck Club
By Amy Tan
The Joy Luck Club is a poignant novel that follows the lives of four Chinese immigrant mothers and their American-raised daughters. Broken up into sixteen interwoven stories, the novel perfectly captures the painful, often tender, and always deep connection between a mother and her daughter. Throughout the novel, the characters struggle to maintain their mother-daughter bond across both generational and cultural differences that are familiar to any immigrant parent and child relationship— whether it is fighting over piano lessons or choosing the correct husband, there does not seem to be a single topic that they can agree on. However, as their journeys progress, Tan reveals that strength of their relationship can be more than what meets the eye—giving hope that it is possible to reconcile the oppositions in their lives between past and present, east and west, and mother and daughter.
Little Fires Everywhere
By Celeste Ng
Now a critically acclaimed show on Hulu, Little Fires Everywhere is a novel set in Shaker Heights: a placid, progressive suburb of Cleveland where everything is planned. For Elena Richardson, a wealthy housewife who spends her days following rules to a T, this is the perfect environment for her to thrive. When Mia Warren, an enigmatic artist and single mother, arrives in this idyllic bubble with her mysterious past, her teenage daughter, and a disregard for the status quo, she threatens to upend Elena and the rest of the community’s perfect image of order. Things come to a head when old family friends of the Richardsons attempt to adopt a Chinese-American baby and start a large-scale custody battle that puts Mia and Elena on opposite sides. Throughout this poignant and heartbreaking novel, Celeste Ng explores the weight of secrets, the nature of art and identity, the intense pull of motherhood, and the danger of believing that blindly following the rules can avert disaster.
All You Can Ever Know: A Memoir
By: Nicole Chung
Nicole Chung was born severely premature, placed for adoption by her Korean parents, and raised by a white family in a sheltered Oregon town. All her life, she was fed a comforting, prepackaged version of her adoption story: that her biological parents had made the ultimate sacrifice in hope of giving her a better life, and that forever feeling slightly out of place was her fate as a transracial adoptee. But as Nicole grew up—facing prejudice her adoptive family couldn’t see, finding her identity as an Asian American and as a writer, she began wondering if the story she’d been told was the whole truth. In a memoir told with warmth, candor and startling insight, Nicole Chung tells of her search for the people who gave her up, coinciding with the birth of her own child. It is a profound and moving chronicle of surprising connections that is a vital read for anyone who has ever struggled to figure out where they belong.
