A Visit From the Goon Squad

I  finished A Visit From the Goon Squad this week, and I am left with conflicting emotions.  It was my good friend's choice for our book club, and it took me by surprise, in part because I expected to love it, and I just didn't.   Goon Squad won a Pulitzer Prize earlier this year and has garnered plenty of attention; I had read the first short story on my Kindle and I was excited to dive into it.  I quickly realized that A Visit From the Goon Squad is not an easy read.  In fact, it's not even a book I would recommend to many people, because it's a lot like work.   

Goon Squad inserts us into the lives of several characters, all of whom are connected, with the theme of the music industry running through the novel. The interconnected stories are told by different people, over a 50-year span of time, but none of the book is in chronological order. Fifty pages into it, I was muddling my way through the second big story, and not really enjoying it.  Thirty pages after that, I was intrigued - certainly enough to read the entire book.  The characters had not become any more likable, but I was finally getting the hang of it.  Egen's constant shifts in time and point of view made following the plot challenging.  Keep in mind that I read a lot - an average of two books a week, more during winter and vacation.  So to have a book still making me struggle after 100 pages is saying something.

My friend summarized it perfectly - she said that Goon Squad was not a book that you would enjoy while you were reading it, but that you would want to talk to someone about it after you finished.  As our book club chatted in the sultry July night, we each brought something different to the discussion.  But as we began to peel back the layers of Goon Squad, our discussion revealed far more than any of us had thought possible.

Therein lies the magic in such a unique book. I might not have enjoyed the journey, but I was very glad once I reached my destination.

Dreams of Joy

In a post from several months ago, I mentioned one of my favorite "Asian-themed" books, Lisa See's Shanghai Girls.  I enjoyed See's perspectives on World War 2 and the struggles for Asian immigrants, and like many people, I was left wanting more when the book ended.

Shanghai Girls' sequel, Dreams of Joy, picks up right where we left off, in the late 1950s.  Joy, Pearl's daughter from the first novel, has recently learned a deep, dark secret about her family.  Hurt by both her mother and her Aunt May, and still reeling from her father's suicide, Joy decides to go to China to discover her roots and to meet the man who she has learned is her biological father, Z.G. Li.  When Pearl learns where Joy has gone, she has no choice but to go to China herself to bring her daughter home.

What neither Joy nor Pearl could predict was the chaos that was beginning in China.  Under Chairman Mao's Great Leap Forward program, China has undergone tremendous changes since Pearl and May fled the country years before.  The Communist regime is in full force and Joy's father, famous Chinese artist Z.G.Li, is being sent to the countryside to teach the peasants how to paint in the "Red" way.  The story follows Joy, as she moves to a commune, falls in love, and  marries, and Pearl, as she fights her way back to Joy and the family she cherishes.

Fans of Lisa See's earlier works will enjoy reading Dreams of Joy, if for no other reason than closure for Shanghai Girls.  Dreams of Joy, however, is a novel unlike those See has written before.  Her past novels, no matter what time period, show both the beauty and the less pleasant side of Chinese life.  In Dreams of Joy, See only shows the ugly side.  This is fitting, because the Great Leap Forward was one of the darkest times in Chinese history.  With individual farms turned into communes, Mao's government sought to maximize the amount of crops produced each year.  What follows is an unmitigated disaster: a combination of droughts, floods and farming requirements from city officials who had no experience with the land leaves China in a state of famine.  By some accounts, as many as 40 million people died of starvation during the three-year period before Mao admitted failure.

See portrays this famine in vivid detail, so much so that it was difficult to read at times.  While her earlier novels have had shocking and painful scenes, it cannot compare to the ravages of famine that See describes in Dreams of Joy.  Lisa See traveled with author Amy Tan to research this novel, and it is clear that her trip to China and what she learned about this time period affected See deeply.

Dreams of Joy is a worthy read, especially if you have read See's earlier works.  There is a happy ending, with a nice big bow.  But a word of warning: beware the title, for "dreams" of joy are the best you can expect this in novel.