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The Joy Luck Club
- Narrated by: Gwendoline Yeo
- Length: 9 hrs and 5 mins
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Publisher's summary
For decades, a quartet of Chinese women who have emigrated to San Francisco gather to eat dim sum, play mahjong, and talk—they call themselves the Joy Luck Club. Over the years, their stories have informed the lives of four daughters who feel the weight of family and world history on their shoulders. With wit and sensitivity, this novel explores the deep, complicated, and sometimes painful connections between mothers and daughters.
Amy Tan entices listeners to immerse themselves into the complex lives of these women.
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Jadine Childs is a Black fashion model with a white patron, a white boyfriend, and a coat made out of ninety perfect sealskins. Son is a Black fugitive who embodies everything she loathes and desires. As Morrison follows their affair, which plays out from the Caribbean to Manhattan and the deep South, she charts all the nuances of obligation and betrayal between Blacks and whites, masters and servants, and men and women.
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So good that I'm writing my first Audible review!
- By BL on 12-10-11
By: Toni Morrison
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Above Us Only Sky
- By: Michele Young-Stone
- Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell
- Length: 9 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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Prudence Eleanor Vilkas was born with a pair of wings molded to her back. Considered a birth defect, her wings were surgically removed, leaving only the ghost of them behind. Growing up in Los Vientos, Florida, Prudence meets her long-estranged Lithuanian grandfather and discovers a miraculous lineage beating and pulsing with past Lithuanian bird-women.
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I'm So Glad I Listened to It!
- By Elizabeth on 08-22-16
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Flame Tree Road
- By: Shona Patel
- Narrated by: Neil Shah
- Length: 10 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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India, 1870s. In a tiny village where society is ruled by a caste system and women are defined solely by marriage, young Biren Roy dreams of forging a new destiny. When his mother suffers the fate of widowhood - shunned by her loved ones and forced to live in solitary penance - Biren devotes his life to effecting change.
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Riveting Love Story
- By Granny on 01-15-20
By: Shona Patel
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The Story Hour
- By: Thrity Umrigar
- Narrated by: Sneha Mathan
- Length: 11 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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Performance
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Story
An experienced psychologist, Maggie carefully maintains emotional distance from her patients. But when she meets a young Indian woman who tried to kill herself, her professional detachment disintegrates. Cut off from her family in India, Lakshmi is desperately lonely and trapped in a loveless marriage. Moved by her plight, Maggie treats Lakshmi in her home office for free, quickly realizing that the despondent woman doesn't need a shrink; she needs a friend.
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A stellar performance almost carried the book...
- By Daryl on 03-04-15
By: Thrity Umrigar
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Mr. Fox
- A Novel
- By: Helen Oyeyemi
- Narrated by: Carol Boyd
- Length: 8 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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Fairy-tale romances end with a wedding and the fairy tales don't get complicated. In this book, celebrated writer Mr. Fox can't stop himself from killing off the heroines of his novels, and neither can his wife, Daphne. It's not until Mary, his muse, comes to life and transforms him from author into subject that his story begins to unfold differently....
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A Great Novel, just Poor for Audio
- By James A. Dittes on 08-13-16
By: Helen Oyeyemi
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In the Country
- Stories
- By: Mia Alvar
- Narrated by: Nancy Wu, Don Castro
- Length: 13 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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These nine globe-trotting, unforgettable stories from Mia Alvar, a remarkable new literary talent, vividly give voice to the women and men of the Filipino diaspora. Here are exiles, emigrants, and wanderers uprooting their families from the Philippines to begin new lives in the Middle East, the United States, and elsewhere - and sometimes turning back again.
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My introduction to Filipino literature and culture
- By Amazon Customer on 03-28-16
By: Mia Alvar
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Boy, Snow, Bird
- By: Helen Oyeyemi
- Narrated by: Susan Bennett, Carra Patterson
- Length: 9 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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In the winter of 1953, Boy Novak arrives by chance in a small town in Massachusetts, looking, she believes, for beauty - the opposite of the life she' s left behind in New York. She marries a local widower and becomes stepmother to his winsome daughter, Snow Whitman. A wicked stepmother is a creature Boy never imagined she' d become, but elements of the familiar tale of aesthetic obsession begin to play themselves out when the birth of Boy' s daughter, Bird, who is dark-skinned, exposes the Whitmans as light-skinned African Americans passing for white.
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For Literary Lovers
- By M. Shipe on 04-25-14
By: Helen Oyeyemi
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Homesick
- My Own Story
- By: Jean Fritz
- Narrated by: Jean Fritz
- Length: 4 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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This heartwarming fictionalized autobiography tells the story of what it is like for a little girl to be growing up in an unfamiliar place. While other girls her age were enjoying childhood in America, Jean Fritz was in China in the midst of political unrest. During this time, foreigners were becoming more and more unpopular, and evacuation at a moment’s notice was imminent. Although Jean appreciated the beauty of China - the mountains, the countryside, the sea - she knew she belonged in America and longed to make her home there.
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Great book!
- By R. SEVERSON on 10-19-18
By: Jean Fritz
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One Amazing Thing
- By: Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
- Narrated by: Purva Bedi, Soneela Nankani, Neil Shah
- Length: 7 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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Winner of a Pushcart Prize for poetry and an American Book Award for her short stories, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni explores themes of women, immigration, and her vibrant Indian culture to great effect. Divakaruni expands on these ideas in One Amazing Thing, a project long in the making and full of electric prose.
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An ok way to kill some time
- By R.Reader on 11-07-12
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I'm Supposed to Protect You from All This
- A Memoir
- By: Nadja Spiegelman
- Narrated by: Nadja Spiegelman
- Length: 11 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
For a long time, Nadja Spiegelman believed her mother was a fairy. More than her famous father, Maus creator Art Spiegelman, and even more than most mothers, hers - French-born New Yorker art director Françoise Mouly - exerted a force over reality that was both dazzling and daunting. As Nadja's body changed and "began to whisper to the adults around me in a language I did not understand", their relationship grew tense.
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Aweful
- By Haley Abreu on 07-05-17
By: Nadja Spiegelman
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Great book, shame about the narrator
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Great book, shame about the narrator
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Just could NOT get past the ugliness
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This is a short story, not a novel
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Narration Issues
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Perfect ---- in every way
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Rules for Virgins
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Loved it - oh so briefly!
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The thrilling new novel from number-one New York Times best-selling author Lisa See explores the lives of a Chinese mother and her daughter who has been abandoned and adopted by an American couple.
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Good Bio but Memoirs is much more entertaining…
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Another Beautiful Novel from Lisa See!
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Narrators spoil it
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Pachinko
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In the early 1900s, teenaged Sunja, the adored daughter of a crippled fisherman, falls for a wealthy stranger. When she discovers she is pregnant–and that her lover is married–she accepts an offer of marriage from a gentle, sickly minister passing through on his way to Japan. But her decision to abandon her home, and to reject her son's powerful father, sets off a dramatic saga that will echo down through the generations. Profoundly moving, Pachinko is a story of love, sacrifice, ambition, and loyalty.
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Great read!
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What listeners say about The Joy Luck Club
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- kojak
- 10-12-16
Beautiful story, so-so narrator
I loved Amy Tam's gorgeous prose. The linked stories were fascinating and slowly revealed the characters. The narrator grated at times. Her Chinese mom voices were good, but the American male characters all sounded like cartoonish buffoons and most of the daughters sounded like imbeciles. And she pronounced "librarian" "li-BARE-ian" and "sword" "SWW-ord." Irritating as all get out. Didn't ruin the book for me, but certain passages were hard to get through.
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- Paul Liu
- 05-21-22
good story, but narrator makes distracting choices
I've read Joy Luck Club before and am pleased to find that it largely withstands the test of time.
The narrator of this audiobook, while great at creating subtly different voices for the mothers and daughters, frequently relies on caricature-ish to the point of stereotyped accents for side characters (sometimes with little justification - why use a "sing-song" Chinese accent when everyone in a particular chapter is Chinese in China speaking Chinese that is only translated for the reader's benefit). This frequently pulled me out of the read and felt like a distraction.
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- sailorgirl12
- 09-04-19
An interesting snapshot of culture and language
As a student of the Chinese language, I really enjoyed this book. Learning more about Chinese (recent) history, culture, and the challenges immigrants face was really interesting and I thought the stories were well done even though it was a little hard to piece together who was who at times.
My biggest issue with this version was the voices. Every American voice sounds like a dumb valley girl. Many of the older Chinese women’s voices sounds like a witch. I would be interested to know if the author intended for the “voices” to be “heard” this way with her text. I found it kind of obnoxious and over done and really took away from the story. But I wouldn’t say they are so bad that you shouldn’t read it if you are interested, just not one of the best available.
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- Sydney Perkins
- 02-04-22
Lovely stories- looking forward to more!
I saw the movie before and loved it, and now love the book even more! Such a great book of generational culture and the relationships between mothers and their daughters. Very much looking forward to reading more of Amy Tan.
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- Leah
- 03-20-21
read the book
The story is truly wonderful but the narrator is terrible in many parts of the story
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- KAREN L BRITTON
- 08-07-18
Beautifully written novel
I know plenty of people did not enjoy the narrator for this novel, but I didn't think she was absolutely awful. Otherwise I wouldn't have been able to listen to the whole book.
As for the novel itself, I really love the stories and how everything is intertwined. I had previously listened to an abridged version from my library, and would not recommend it at all. Make sure you pick up an unabridged version of this novel!
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- Terah
- 12-09-18
Beautiful stories
The stories of these mothers and daughters are very intriguing and offer narratives of Chinese immigrants and their first generation Chinese American children. I really enjoyed the story but at times the narrator would use a yelling voice for a character and that was a bit difficult to listen to.
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- JTHJTH
- 04-20-19
One my favorite novels
A beautiful, tragic but hopeful, beautifully written story about 4 Chinese mother/daughter pairs that is full of lessons and reflections anyone can relate to.
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- angelo g.
- 03-30-17
Amazing Dialogue and Voice
Amazing dialogue. w w w w w w w w w w w w w a b a c d
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- Megan
- 09-04-24
love amy tan, didn't enjoy the narrator
i think amy tan's prose is a special experience, and her stories are always deeply emotional to me. narrator made everything a bit cringey though, her strange voices for certain characters really threw me off
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