Share <Embed>

Buy New

$9.52

List Price: $16.00
Save: $6.48 (41%)

FREE Shipping on orders with at least $25 of books.

In Stock.

Ships from and sold by Amazon.com. Gift-wrap available.

Turn on 1-Click ordering for this browser

Want it tomorrow, June 10? Order within and choose One-Day Shipping at checkout. Details

Ship to:

Select a shipping address:

Buy Used

$8.95

FREE Shipping on orders over $25.

Used: Good | Details

Sold by KAYLA'S MEDIA STORE

Fulfilled by Amazon

Turn on 1-Click ordering for this browser

Have one to sell? Sell on Amazon

Flip to back Flip to front

Listen Playing... Paused You're listening to a sample of the Audible audio edition.
Learn more

See all 4 images

The Joy Luck Club: A Novel Paperback – September 21, 2006

by Amy Tan (Author)

848 customer reviews

See all 52 formats and editions Hide other formats and editions

Price

New from

Used from

Kindle

"Please retry"

$7.38

—

Hardcover

"Please retry"

$19.29

$11.75

$9.14

Paperback

"Please retry"

$9.52

$5.14

$2.37

Loose Leaf

"Please retry"

—

Audible, Unabridged

"Please retry"

$0.00

Free with your Audible trial

Mass Market Paperback

"Please retry"

—

$6.50

$0.01

Audio CD, Abridged

"Please retry"

$21.95

$17.96

Four mothers, four daughters, four families whose histories shift with the four winds depending on who's "saying" the stories. In 1949 four Chinese women, recent immigrants to San Francisco, begin meeting to eat dim sum, play mahjong, and talk. United in shared unspeakable loss and hope, they call themselves the Joy Luck Club. Rather than sink into tragedy, they choose to gather to raise their spirits and money. "To despair was to wish back for something already lost. Or to prolong what was already unbearable." Forty years later the stories and history continue.

With wit and sensitivity, Amy Tan examines the sometimes painful, often tender, and always deep connection between mothers and daughters. As each woman reveals her secrets, trying to unravel the truth about her life, the strings become more tangled, more entwined. Mothers boast or despair over daughters, and daughters roll their eyes even as they feel the inextricable tightening of their matriarchal ties. Tan is an astute storyteller, enticing readers to immerse themselves into these lives of complexity and mystery.

The Joy Luck Club: A Novel

$9.52 FREE Shipping on orders with at least $25 of books. In Stock. Ships from and sold by Amazon.com. Gift-wrap available.

Frequently Bought Together

Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought

Page 1 of 1 Start overPage 1 of 1

This shopping feature will continue to load items. In order to navigate out of this carousel please use your heading shortcut key to navigate to the next or previous heading.

Wilfred Guerin

7

Paperback
$68.63
Rudyard Kipling

13

Hardcover
$12.24
Firoozeh Dumas

421

Paperback
$9.75
David O. Stewart

80

Paperback
$12.13
Laurie Neu Rozakis

9

Paperback
$7.50
William Shakespeare

254

Paperback
$3.77

Product Details

Paperback: 288 pages
Publisher: Penguin Books; Later Printing edition (September 21, 2006)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0143038095
ISBN-13: 978-0143038092
Product Dimensions: 5.3 x 0.6 x 8 inches
Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars See all reviews (848 customer reviews)
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,175 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #4 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Women's Fiction > Mothers & Children
- #9 in Books > Literature & Fiction > United States > Asian American
- #17 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Women's Fiction > Friendship

Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?

Customer Reviews

848

4.2 out of 5 stars

5 star		56%
4 star		28%
3 star		7%
2 star		3%
1 star		6%

See all 848 customer reviews

Share your thoughts with other customers

Write a customer review

Top Customer Reviews

I couldn't help myself. I read it again.

By A Customer on September 27, 1998

Format: Mass Market Paperback

THE JOY LUCK CLUB, a novel by Amy Tan, tells of the intricate relationships between two strong-willed generations, four tough, intelligent American women and their equally tenacious Chinese daughters. The four families are connected through the Joy Luck Club, a mah jong group that meets each week. After its founding member passes away, her daughter is asked to take her place at the table and the stories begin. Each of the eight women narrates two stories from her own point of view except for the deceased whose daughter tells her stories for her. The mothers relate stories about their lives in China, and the daughters tell of the trials that they face growing up as first-generation Chinese-Americans. The women that Tan has crafted are well developed and extraordinarily believable. She shows the strong and weak sides to all eight of her main characters. Her men however, are flat and are there simply as supporting characters. This is to be expected since this is essentially a book about mother-daughter relationships and how women bond. Therefore, it is my assumption that this book is aimed, for the most part, at the female reader. Tan's literary style is truly novel. The way this woman writes can't be compared to anything that I have read in recent years. The novel that I feel comes closest to mirroring Tan's subject matter is THE GOOD EARTH by Pearl S. Buck. As I was reading, I found myself continually drawing parallels between the two. Therefore, if you found Buck's novel enjoyable, Tan's will be a pleasure as well. At face value, I feel that Tan wrote sixteen incredibly interesting stories. It is the undercurrent that runs throughout the novel, however, that makes it a classic.Read more ›

5 Comments 140 people found this helpful. Was this review helpful to you? Yes No Sending feedback...

Thank you for your feedback.

Sorry, we failed to record your vote. Please try again

Report abuse

A Tapestry of Stories

By Debbie Lee Wesselmann TOP 100 REVIEWERVINE VOICE on October 7, 2004

Format: Mass Market Paperback

Amy Tan's novel of many voices has become required reading in high school and college contemporary literature courses - and for good reason. Its intimate look at Chinese immigrants and their children opens up a wealth of questions about cultural acclimation in a country dominated by another race. Set in San Francisco and China, the novel begins with Jing-Mei ("June"), who has been asked by her father to take her recently deceased mother's place in the Joy Luck Club, ostensibly a mah jong gathering of her mother's closest friends, but also an investment club, symbolizing the merging of the two cultures. June agrees, although she doesn't feel she makes an adequate substitute for a woman who seemed so unlike her. When her "aunties" urge June to tell her sisters, women she has never met and who were left at the side of a road in China, about her mother's life, they are troubled when she confesses that she did not know her mother except as a mother. She sees that they fear that their own daughters might not know about them, and so she impulsively promises to find her mother's long lost children and tell them about their mother. In this way, the novel sets up its structure of interrelated stories. Although the stories of June and her mother Suyuan frame the others, those of An-Mei, Rose, Lindo, Waverly, Ying-ying, and Lena are no less important.

These women and their daughters form a complicated quilt of what it means to be a Chinese-American, whether born in China or in the United States, and they highlight the difficulties of bridging two cultures. The choices each woman makes are always difficult and often heart-breaking. Students might want to explore the difference in attitude between the Chinese women and their American daughters.Read more ›

Comment 45 people found this helpful. Was this review helpful to you? Yes No Sending feedback...

Thank you for your feedback.

Sorry, we failed to record your vote. Please try again

Report abuse

Broad in scope and appeal

By Brian on April 7, 2010

Format: Paperback

I'll just come out and say it: I think this book is very good, and I think it will hold up well over time. There are a lot of different story lines running through The Joy Luck Club (TJLC), so how you rate it may depend on where you place your focus, but here's why I think it is so good:

SUMMARY
On the face of it, this book follows the intertwined lives of four families of Chinese immigrants and their first-generation American children. I was most drawn to the story of Jing-mei ("June"). After the passing of her often-distant mother (Suyuan), June suddenly takes an interest in getting to know Suyuan's circle of friends better. In the course of meeting with them weekly to play mah-jongg, June gradually develops a comprehension of her mother's very full, very different life in China so long ago. Suyuan's courage in the face of devastating adversity throws June's childhood memories into drastically different context. Eventually, June discovers the existance of step-sisters she didn't know she had, whom she ultimately travels to find.

THEMES WITH BROAD APPEAL
I'm neither Chinese nor a woman, yet I found I could not only relate to everything going on, but was frequently reminded of people in my own life. Parents the world over deal with pride and disappointment in their children. Each generation from the dawn of time has lamented how "kids these days" seem so quick to abandon sacred and meaningful old ways, in favor of vacuous and superficial fads. So often, progeny don't comprehend the hardships their elders endured. Children struggle with parental expectations, and the all many ways their parents seem "out of touch" and unable to fully appreciate the particulars of their lives. Every family has inter- and intragenerational friction, even power struggles, at times.Read more ›

3 Comments 14 people found this helpful. Was this review helpful to you? Yes No Sending feedback...

Thank you for your feedback.

Sorry, we failed to record your vote. Please try again

Report abuse

See all 848 customer reviews (newest first)

Write a customer review

Customer Images

Most Recent Customer Reviews

I very much enjoyed reading this book

I very much enjoyed reading this book. I found it hard to follow the chapters at first, since they were always from a new perspective and time, but I got used to it after the first... Read more

Published 7 days ago by Ashley

Great book!

Great book, great price,super fast delivery!

Published 8 days ago by sempertrad

I confess to being a little confused on the characters from segment to...

If you're looking for a plot, don't bother. If you're looking for character development and a description of cultural conflict between generations, this is your book. Read more

Published 1 month ago by Fred M.

Five Stars

great

Published 1 month ago by tim williams

Grace's Touch

Amy Tan's novel The Joy Luck Club features four Chinese families and is told from the point of view of the mothers and their daughters. Read more

Published 1 month ago by Chelsea Head

A Beautiful Tale of Love, Relationships, and Daughters

A beautiful tale of a daughter learning of her mother's life before she was born, her mother's friends and their daughters, and her Chinese heritage. Read more

Published 1 month ago by BPhillips

... class and the book turned out to be an awesome book. The story...

I read this book for College and Reading/Writing class and the book turned out to be an awesome book. Read more

Published 2 months ago by tangeman

A heartwarming story of love and family.

In The Joy Luck Club Amy Tan tells the story of eight women, four mothers and their daughters, who formed a club to play mah jong. Read more

Published 2 months ago by John Martin

Four Mothers, Four Daughters, and Plenty of Engaging Drama

I love a good mother-daughter story, or any story that speaks to the empowerment of women. The Joy Luck Club delivers, although some characters do so more than others. Read more

Published 2 months ago by Stephanie McCall

I liked the book but at times I was lost in ...

I liked the book but at times I was lost in names and who was who the author was talking about. All in all it was a good read!

Published 3 months ago by Ekaterina Gladkikh

Set up an Amazon Giveaway

Amazon Giveaway allows you to run promotional giveaways in order to create buzz, reward your audience, and attract new followers and customers. Learn more about Amazon Giveaway

This item: The Joy Luck Club: A Novel

Set up a giveaway