The Joy Luck ClubReview posted December 29, 2025.
Phoenix Books, 2008. 9 hours, 5 minutes. Original book published in 1989.
Review written December 1, 2025, from a library eaudiobook.
Starred Review
I'm going to go ahead and call this an Old Favorite, though I only read it once before - sometime before I started writing Sonderbooks in 2001. I remember that we watched the movie based on the book when my second was a baby - and felt like it should have a warning label because a baby dies in the movie. I revisited the book because my friend Suzanne mentioned it when she signed up for Book Talking with Sondy. I then discovered that my library has an eaudiobook version available and put a hold on it.
The book is wonderful. It features four Chinese women who immigrated to America and their four American daughters. The women met monthly for a Joy Luck Club where they played Mahjongg, but now one of them has recently passed away, and her daughter has been invited to join the game. And the women in the club have a surprise for the daughter - they have found her long lost twin sisters, and have gotten her tickets to China to meet them, fulfilling her mother's dearest wish.
The rest of the book gives us stories - stories of the mothers, and stories of the daughters. We eventually learn how the twin babies were lost so long ago during war time. We see how the mothers and daughters lived very different lives and don't fully understand each other. We see that the daughters have more in common with each other than they ever realize.
The reader did a fine job of consistently giving the characters in this book their own unique voices - but I had trouble in the audio version keeping track of whose story I was hearing and which daughter went with which mother. Unfortunately, the part of the chapter heading that showed in Libby did not include the character's name, and I listened to this while driving to a new place, and missed some crucial details. I did remember how it worked from having read it before, so I feel like I still appreciated the book.
And this remains a classic novel about mothers and daughters and the experience of being an immigrant. With each character having different experiences in their journeys, literal and figurative, it shows how every immigrant's experience is unique - yet gives us a window on what the challenges they face, which even their own children may not fully understand.