Dreams of Joy (Shanghai Girls #2)

English language

Published Dec. 20, 2011

ISBN:
978-1-4000-6712-1
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3 stars (3 reviews)

Dreams of Joy is a 2011 novel by Lisa See. It debuted as #1 in the New York Times list of best selling fiction. In this book See completes the circle she began in Shanghai Girls. The former novel ends with the suicide of Pearl's husband Sam and the shattering discovery by Joy that May is really her mother, Pearl is her aunt, and Z.G., the famous Chinese artist, is her father. Joy's guilt-driven journey to China to find her father and Pearl's loving pursuit are placed in the context of the tumult and suffering of Mao's China—especially in the context of the horrific famine caused by Mao's misguided Great Leap Forward. See's novel uses Mao's China as her background, but her story focuses on the change and growth of her main characters – Pearl, Joy, Z.G., and May. Susan Salter Reynolds suggests that “it’s a story with characters who …

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Review of 'Dreams of Joy (Shanghai Girls #2)' on 'Goodreads'

3 stars

This will be a short review, mostly because there isn't a whole lot to really say about it that hasn't already been covered. Joy returns to China to seek her roots and her family, and gets wrapped up in all the fervor surrounding Red China in the late 1950s. She makes (many) poor decisions. Like mother, like daughter, I suppose.

Joy spends most of the book being an unreliable narrator, where her poor decision-making skills are buried in her optimism and intentionally only seeing things at the commune she lives at in China the way she wants them to be seen. She genuinely seems to believe everything she's being told at the commune, which seems like a strange departure from the confident, world-experienced college student she was portrayed to be in the first book. Everything that happened to her felt very much contingent on her remaining (willingly or otherwise) oblivious …

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