Mother's Day, Momhood, & Tan's The Joy Luck Club

This blog has previously recommended several mom-focused novels:

• Grossman's To the End of the Land, 
• Shriver's disturbing We Need to Talk About Kevin, and 
• Donoghue's even more disturbing Room. 

Light-hearted mom novels seem a little hard to come by!

Anyway, for this mother's day my book recommendation is a classic novel about mother-daughter bonding, Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club:

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.

You might also like the list "The Top Ten Novels about Motherhood" from the Momoir Project blog.