The Kitchen God's Wife

Amy Tan

A well-written story that exposes the cultural hardships of life for women in 1930's and 40's China through the story of Winnie. Winnie has kept many secrets of her life from everyone she loves -- everyone except her friend Helen who now suddenly decides to tell these secrets to Winnie's adult daughter, Pearl. Faced with being exposed, Winnie sits Pearl down and tells her the truths of her life, her sufferings and hardships and misfortunes. This was an interesting and well-written read, but there were several things that annoyed me. The first was that Tan begins the novel with Pearl as narrator and then shortly into the book she switches to Winnie as narrator. We only hear her daughter's voice again at the end. So she sets the reader up for one voice but then she abandons that voice in favor of another. My other problem with the book was that the further into the story I got, the more excruciating the story became. There was nothing but misery _everywhere_. It was really more than both Winnie and I could take. Tan never lets up and by the end you just get tired of misfortune after misfortune after misfortune -- the story almost loses credibility because of it. I'm not trying to dissuade you from picking this book up however. It's a very worthy read