The Joy Luck Club, by Amy Tan

The book is divided into four sections. Four Chinese mothers; four American-born daughters; two stories for each woman. The first tells a story from each mother's childhood, and the second section tells an episode from the relationship between each mother and her daughter. The next two sections reveal a bit more of the mothers' pasts and of the mother-daughter relationships. It is a very interesting concept and method of story-telling. I find myself frequently flipping back and forth, to review what I had read before of each mother and daughter. We get a very poignant glimpse into the Chinese psyche, not that there's just one for all!

Home and Away, by Joanne Meschery

I reviewed this book on LibraryThing in May, 2013, but I failed to post my review on Bookcrossing. (I corrected that omission just now.) It has been released.

This is the story of two players on a high school girls' basketball team, their team and their coach, told through the eyes of one girl's mother. The mother is a very introspective person, and everything she sees, encounters, experiences, and hears reminds her of something else, which she has to carry through in her mind. The associations are not always clear, but even when they are, it makes for a tedious effort to plod through the storyline. It took me a long time to read this book (almost a week), only partly because my husband and I are going through a move.

The Kitchen God's Wife, by Amy Tan

Read and reviewed in May, 2015

A very powerful book, and distrubing. It begins very simply and seemingly ordinary, with a family reunion and wedding. However, as the mother reveals more and more of her past to her daughter, it became very hard to read, especially about Weili's first marriage, the abuse and the heartaches she endured. The story line begins in California, and takes us back to war-torn China, facing first the Japanese and then the Communists. War and politics are only a background for Weili's troubles, though.

Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood: A Novel, by Rebecca Wells

Read and reviewed in November, 2014. Released later

Wow, what a wild ride! A mother's life, especially her adolesence, as seen through the eyes of her eldest daughter, Siddalee, with frequent flashbacks as remembered by the mother, Vivi. Herself the daughter of an alcoholic, abusive father and an overly pious, strictly religious mother, Vivi was the ringleader of a group of four girls who remained best friends from childhood to late middle age. They had some wild escapades in their youth, including a skinny-dipping party in the town's water tower! Vivi was beaten by her father, chastised by her mother, and sent to a strict Catholic girls' boarding school. No wonder that she became an alcoholic, and that her own four young children were overwhelming for her. The surprising thing is that her daughter Sidda turned out to be as normal as she was.

Save Me, by Lisa Scottoline

Read, reviewed, and released in May, 2014

It could have been a good book if Ms. Scottoline had stuck to one or two themes, but there was too much going on. It was all over the place: family relationships, school bullying, political corruption, high-risk crime-fighting. Given Rose's reticent, anxious personality, it seems unlikely that she would have boldly gone into an unfamiliar factory looking for clues to the explosion and fire at her daughter's school. The bits about her mother's alcoholism and her own slight over-indulgence of wine one evening seemed to be thrown in for no good reason. I will not be looking for any more books by this author.