by Amy Tan
I might have finished slogging through this had I not had several other library books which were becoming due. Then again, this isn't really my cup of tea, my being an elderly, repressed Calvinist and all. I made it through 36% of the book, or 336 pp. So, we have a young American girl in China (Shan...
This is a novel which provides a double cultural distance for most readers, arising from both place (most of it is set in China) and time (there is a long, intergenerational span of time covered, but the major events of the plot take place in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century). Nonethe...
I liked this book a lot. Not enough to re-read often, if at all, but I was glad I read it. I myself never got over Edward's death. Why couldn't she be with him? Of course, I know why, but the tragedy! Anyway, this book was satisfying to read, and I'd recommend it.
So, I'm a huge Amy Tan fan, and I have been looking forward to this since it first got released. And I know, I know, usually when you look forward to a book, that's exactly when it disappoints you. Surprisingly, this one didn't! It was amazing. It covers a topic that Tan covers in most, if not all o...
A few years back I read Ms. Tan's "Rule for Virgins" and loved Magic Gourd's lessons to Violet the courtesan. Now we move to the full length novel titled "The Valley of Amazement".The Valley of Amazement begins with the tale of Violet, a half American and Chinese girl living in Shanghai with her mot...
I always enjoy Amy Tan's writing, and this book, her latest, was no exception.Here, Tan spins a lengthy but absorbing tale of a half-Chinese courtesan in the Shanghai of the early 20th century.By turns sad and sexy, it ultimately unfolds that this is a story, more than anything else, of the relation...
I read Tan's The Hundred Secret Senses years ago and loved it; I quite enjoyed The Bonesetter's Daughter as well. I'm one of the few people on the planet who didn't much like The Joy Luck Club, but it was Tan's first novel and my reaction had more to do with the way she chose to tell the story than ...
The Story behind the Story Amy Tan's inspiration for The Valley of Amazement originated at a visit to The Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, where she stumbled upon an academic book with a BW photo of courtesans - "a class of women who were influential in introducing Western popular culture to Sha...
It is very apparent that Tan did a huge amount of research before writing this novel. Her writing is very fluid and strong, so why than did I only rate this book a three? When I first started reading this I was enthralled, reading about the lives of the concubine, the houses that provided pleasure b...
When Christina at A Reader of Fictions nabbed a copy of The Valley of Amazement for me at BEA, I nearly fell over. You see, I wanted this book from the second I heard about it. I love books about Asian cultures and a book about Chinese courtesans in Shanghai? I was salivating. And it's a really big ...
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