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The Kitchen God's Wife | 
 enlarge | Author: Amy Tan
Creator: Gwendoline Yeo
Publisher: Phoenix Audio
Category: Book
List Price: $44.95
Buy New: $26.19
You Save: $18.76 (42%)
New (12) from $26.19
Avg. Customer Rating:  161 reviews
Sales Rank: 1157313
Format: Audiobook, Cd
Media: Audio CD
Edition: Unabridged
Number Of Items: 14
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.9
Dimensions (in): 5.8 x 5.2 x 2
ISBN: 1597771805
Dewey Decimal Number: 813
EAN: 9781597771801
ASIN: 1597771805
Publication Date: May 1, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: Brand new item. Over 3.5 million customers served. Order now. Selling online since 1995. Few left in stock - order soon. Code: I20080823021210S
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Product Description
With the same narrative skills and evocative powers that made her first novel, "The Joy Luck Club," a national bestseller, Tan now tells the story of Winnie Louie, an aging Chinese woman unfolding a life's worth of secrets to her suspicious, Americanized daughter. Unabridged. 14 CDs.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 156 more reviews...
 Worth reading, but Tan has written better July 24, 2008
The Kitchen God's Wife reminded me of The Bonesetter's Daughter in that it was much about mothers, daughters, secrets, and life in China before immigrating to America.
The book tells the story of Winnie, a young girl who survives a harrowing childhood and then a disastrous marriage in war-torn China. Winnie eventually immigrates to America and then keeps her life in China a secret from her daughter, Pearl. The course of the novel follows Winnie as she tells her daughter all of her secrets and the two become closer.
While I enjoyed The Kitchen God's Wife, and I think it is worth reading, it was difficult to absorb at times. For one, Winnie's first marriage, to an abusive coward named Wen Fu, was frustrating at times. I understand that a woman's place in 1940s China was very limited, but I couldn't help feeling that Winnie was so worried about shame and being impolite that she wouldn't do what was necessary to save herself and her children. In many ways, I felt that she allowed herself to be taken advantage of, and it was difficult to read about that.
Secondly, I wouldn't recommend reading this novel in close proximity to The Bonesetter's Daughter. The two stories are too similar. Of the two, I think I liked The Bonesetter's Daughter better, because I felt the female characters were a bit stronger.
 Riveting, inspiring and educational March 12, 2008
My wife and I will often read a novel to each other if it has plenty of drama, and tells a great story. The Kitchen God's Wife is such a story! The novel starts off slow but interesting, and as the end nears it becomes harder and harder to put down.
Most of the narrative is anchored around Winnie Louie's revelation of her secret and tumultuous family history to her daughter, Pearl Louis Brandt. Pearl has a secret too - she has MS and doesn't want to tell her mother. The two open up after prodding from Helen, who becomes concerned about taking secrets to the grave after being diagnosed with a benign brain tumor. But, the biggest secret of all isn't revealed until the very end of the book... and I don't want to spoil the ending.
Winnie describes a childhood of rejection - first by her mother and father and then aunts and uncles. After that she endures a brutal marriage to a man named Wen Fu, and eventually escapes to a new life in the USA. Through it all Winnie's spirit and determination survive intact. Also woven into the story are insights into Chinese culture and history, so the novel is at once educational, inspiring, and riveting.
Savory! March 1, 2008
Tan's second book is The Kitchen God's Wife. Like the Joy Luck Club, the storyline revolves around issues of mother-daughter relationships, family obligations, immigrant life, and a dark and meaningful secret's power to shaped lives. Tan says that this book was an attempt to write her mother's "true story," although in a fictionalized way. Apparently in the Joy Luck Club, she was only testing the waters. Now we are onto some really powerful stuff.
As cousin Bao-Bao's wedding draws near, Winnie realizes she must let the family skeletons out of the closet for Pearl's benefit, before family friend Helen does it for her. Not only does Winnie and Helen's shared past contain powerful information that is most appropriately given from mother to daughter, Winnie fears the ways in which Helen has remembered the events differently.
Winnie is tired of the old secrets and lies that have become reality. No longer worried that she will be deported and sent back to a horrible fate in the homeland, Winnie tells Pearl her story. As Amy Tan said during the Shanghai Literary Festival, "things that have the power to destroy also have the power to heal." As the secrets unfold, this tale becomes a highly engaging, intricate web of beautifully written stories within a story.
I tried to read it as slowly as possible so I could savor every nuance of this wonderful book!
 Beautiful but uninspiring January 12, 2008
I absolutely loved Amy Tan's "The Joy Luck Club". As an Asian-American myself, I found it to be a beautiful and genuine telling of cultural and familial challenges faced by immigrants. Therefore, I started "Kitchen God's Wife" with high hopes.
Many things are similar between the two novels. Both are filled to bursting with rich, lyric writing. You can taste the sweetness of the rice cakes and frown at the smell of industrial smoke in Amy Tan's China and America. Both introduce compelling family stories of wrestling with cultural differences and the damages of war.
However, that's where the similarities end. "Kitchen God's Wife" takes the wry cynicism in "Joy Luck Club" and fills the whole story with a sense of constant depression populated with utterly uninspiring characters. The main female character begins the story in the dark about her daughter's secrets and spends the rest of her flashback describing how lost and helpless she always felt. Male character #1 begins the story pompous and irritating and descends into monstrous over the course of 200 pages. Male character #2 is unbelievably perfect and never deviates from his predictable course of knight in shining armor.
The story has no development, no climax, and no resolution. I know nothing about the characters at the end of the story that I didn't know 50 pages in. Unfortunately, this made even the female character's most heartbreaking experiences feel boring and predictable.
This story had a lot of potential, and I was sad that it fell so short of expectations.
Beautifully written work by amy tan January 2, 2008
I've read "The Kitchen God's Wife" three times, once as a newly married woman, once as a new mother, and now after having recently lost my father. Every time I read it, I see something new in it, something that mirrors my own life.
The theme of Tan's that always mirrors my life and to which I have such connection is that of Pearl's relationship with her mother. I so completely and painfully understand the resentments, the feeling of having to walk on eggshells every time she talks to her mother, trying to help my children understand my mother's heritage and dealing with my mother's hurt when they don't want to understand.
Many say that "The Joy Luck Club" is the best of Amy Tan's books, but I think it's "The Kitchen God's Wife." JLC is a masterpiece but TKGW for me has even more depth to it.
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