Dreams of Joy

I remember when I was in highschool and thinking I was hot shit because I was taking honors and A.P. history classes. I told my dad about what I learned about Karl Marx and the benefits of communism and how hey, the ideals actually sound pretty cool. He looked at me with utter disgust and told me I would never be able to have an opinion on this unless I experienced it. Luckily for me, I was quickly disillusioned as I heard stories about his childhood and sat down and listened.

Unfortunately for Joy, she chose to be angry at her parents for being boaters (ouch) and went back to China to experience communism herself.

This book was hard to read, it was unpleasant. Still, it was very well written and it's important.

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 to what's going on around her, and it was hard to really feel bad for her because of it.I'm glad I read the book to wrap up the events from [b:Shanghai Girls 5960325 Shanghai Girls (Shanghai Girls #1) Lisa See https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1327968416l/5960325.SY75.jpg 5991850], but ultimately neither book really felt really solid to me.

I liked this book as much as [b:Shanghai Girls 5960325 Shanghai Girls Lisa See http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1255570412s/5960325.jpg 5991850], but for different reasons. In this book, the plot just isn't as believable. And by plot, I am referring to the actions and interactions of the characters.I found it difficult to believe that Joy found her father so quickly. I found the relatively happy ending to be a stretch as well. I truly wanted Pearl and Dun to be reunited, but I just didn't think it could be possible. And how on Earth did Joy's husband turn out to be such an ass? She really had no idea what he was like? I guess maybe that can happen, just seems unlikely.Still, I have decided that after reading outside of my “safety genres” of science fiction and fantasy that I really like historical fiction. I enjoy reading about things that actually happened in the past through the eyes of someone there, fictionally. I don't know enough about China and it's history, but it seemed sound enough in this book. After finishing, I gobbled up a ton of history about China in the 20th century, and to me, that means a book was meaningful and deserving of 4 stars. I see a lot of criticism about Lisa See's writing style, and much of it I can agree with. It's unrefined, it's too choppy, and the plot is, well, ho-hum. But oh, the inspiration that I was filled with after reading it just trumps her critiques.