Ms. Chan’s memoir is a complex one. Parts of it I enjoyed and other portions I found confusing.
I don’t know much about the Chinese culture. Beginning some of the sections of the book with an excerpt about the animal the Chinese people feel denotes each of the years she was writing about and what that meant, gave me some knowledge about how the author viewed events occurring at that time and how this affected her. That part was helpful but a little puzzling also at times in the way it was written.
As far as other structuring of the book, I felt Ms. Chan skipped around to different things too much. The parts about her father were interesting but not in any particular order. Snippets of his life, his father, other relatives, and her mother were not included in any logical order I could perceive. In between she philosophies and includes quotations from various people. I know she is searching to find closure and meaning in her own life after her beloved father’s death, but the various tangents she went off on were frustrating and confusing.
The author has great respect for and loved her father dearly. I wonder if a separate book about this dear man and his family would have been a good idea since she had so much she wanted to relate about them. Those sections of the book were fascinating and probably kept me reading. I know coming to terms with her father’s death precipitated some of Ms. Chan’s own growth and rebuilding of her life. Thus he needs to be in her memoir, but there is just so much information since she also wants to put in facts and ideas relating to Chinese culture, storytelling, myths, integration, environment, etc.
In general with Ms. Chan’s book there was just an overload of information which I felt frustrated by. It seems she was trying to educate the reader too thoroughly on some of her own philosophies and has included more than needed on this and other family members. Just one reader’s opinion.
I thank BookishFirst for my copy of this book.
I don’t know much about the Chinese culture. Beginning some of the sections of the book with an excerpt about the animal the Chinese people feel denotes each of the years she was writing about and what that meant, gave me some knowledge about how the author viewed events occurring at that time and how this affected her. That part was helpful but a little puzzling also at times in the way it was written.
As far as other structuring of the book, I felt Ms. Chan skipped around to different things too much. The parts about her father were interesting but not in any particular order. Snippets of his life, his father, other relatives, and her mother were not included in any logical order I could perceive. In between she philosophies and includes quotations from various people. I know she is searching to find closure and meaning in her own life after her beloved father’s death, but the various tangents she went off on were frustrating and confusing.
The author has great respect for and loved her father dearly. I wonder if a separate book about this dear man and his family would have been a good idea since she had so much she wanted to relate about them. Those sections of the book were fascinating and probably kept me reading. I know coming to terms with her father’s death precipitated some of Ms. Chan’s own growth and rebuilding of her life. Thus he needs to be in her memoir, but there is just so much information since she also wants to put in facts and ideas relating to Chinese culture, storytelling, myths, integration, environment, etc.
In general with Ms. Chan’s book there was just an overload of information which I felt frustrated by. It seems she was trying to educate the reader too thoroughly on some of her own philosophies and has included more than needed on this and other family members. Just one reader’s opinion.
I thank BookishFirst for my copy of this book.