The Kitchen God's Wife Review

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(More customer reviews)THE KITCHEN GOD'S WIFE, Amy Tan's second novel, is another story that deals with family history and relationships between mothers and daughters. Unlike her first novel, THE JOY LUCK CLUB, THE KITCHEN GOD'S WIFE takes place mostly in the past.
Pearl and her mother Winnie have never had a very good relationship. Winnie criticizes Pearl often, and makes it unpleasant for Pearl whenever they come to visit. The book opens with Pearl, her non-Asian husband Phil, and their two young children making the drive to San Francisco to attend a family wedding.
Everyone in the family is there at the wedding, including close family friends and relatives that have been a part of Winnie's life since her days back in China in the early `20's and `30's. An argument breaks out between Pearl and Winnie at the wedding, but before Pearl and her family return home, she and her mother talk. The story that Pearl hears from her mother is a story she has never heard before. It is a secret that Winnie has kept from her daughter for decades, for fear of hurting Pearl. Pearl herself has a secret, but it becomes secondary as Winnie's story unfolds.
Winnie's modern day world was a lifetime away from her early beginnings in China. She was born to a woman that was one of many wives belonging to a man Winnie knew as her father. He was a stranger to her, never giving her the time of day. Winnie's mother was beautiful and educated, and together they lived the life of the pampered rich because of her mother's station in life. Winnie's life turns for the worse when her mother disappears for reasons unknown to the young girl. Winnie finds herself losing the protective life she had with her mother, the home she grew up in, and placed in the home of a distant relative, to be treated like a second class citizen. Her life is never the same again.
Because of her new station in life, Winnie is destined to never marry, but through a fluke of fate, she ends up marrying a man that should have been destined for her cousin Peanut. However, after they are married, Winnie finds out that this husband is not the romantic wonderful man he appeared to be during the beginning of their courtship. From this point in her life, she knows only unhappiness and suffering.
Winnie has to endure much during this marriage, including abuse, countless miscarriages and loss of children to sickness and poverty, and with the outbreak of war in China, she does not know what her future will be like. What finally brings her to America and to the husband that Pearl knows as her father, is for the reader to find out.
I highly recommend THE KITCHEN GOD'S WIFE. Although this book is not as fast a read as THE JOY LUCK CLUB, I found that the history of Winnie was fascinating, taking me to a country that I know so little about. The story of Pearl becomes second to Winnie's, but Winnie's story bridges the two stories together, as the reader finds by the end of the book.

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Paul, Betty, And Pearl Review

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(More customer reviews)"Paul, Betty, and Pearl" is a love story played out against the backdrop of World War II. The story begins with Lieutenant Paul Van Vliet's arrival in Hawaii a few months before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941. Paul is with the U.S. Army Signal Corps. A single man, he is reunited with his sister Dottie, who has lived in Hawaii with her husband for several years. Through Dottie, Paul meets Betty, who is married to Naval officer Eric Lundstrom. At a party a few days before the attack on Pearl Harbor, Paul and Betty realize they have a strong mutual attraction, and one thing leads to another, resulting in an adulterous relationship that lasts throughout the war. To say any more about the outcome of Paul and Betty's relationship would be a spoiler.
In the first few chapters, the story was somewhat reminiscent of James Jones' novel "From Here to Eternity," but that book ended shortly after Pearl Harbor. "Paul, Betty, and Pearl" covers the period from mid-1941 to early-1946. In most fictional WWII stories, the central character is a fighting man, either an infantryman, a flyer, or a sailor. Paul Van Vliet, however, is in the Army Signal Corps, which was tasked with such functions as battlefield telephone and radio communications, and radar warning of air attacks. It was interesting to me, a WWII junkie, to read about the role that the Signal Corps played in military operations. This is not a techno-war story, and the reader isn't buried in arcane technical details and jargon, but it was a nice departure from most war stories. In any case, the story focuses on Paul and Betty and the events around them, not the hardware.
"Peter, Paul, and Pearl" isn't the colossal soap opera that Herman Wouk's "War and Remembrance" was with its dozens of characters and action spanning the globe. It's a smaller, more intimate story that follows Paul's assignments in Hawaii, the U.S., North Africa, and Europe. Paul and Betty stay in touch with each other during the war, although they must be careful not to raise suspicions that would cause a scandal in that more decorous era. And Paul and Betty are not bad people, they're struggling to be honorable while at the same time being deeply in love with each other.
The major characters are finely drawn and well developed. Paul and Betty and their family members are real flesh-and-blood people with both strengths and weaknesses. Some of the characters are not always admirable, but there are no real villains, just ordinary people caught up in events beyond their control and trying to make the best of things. In telling their story, the author very skillfully recreates the wartime era with its customs, music, and language, which gives a realistic feel to his writing.
In the story, Paul is involved in the radar warning system that actually detected the Japanese planes approaching, but whose operators assumed that the planes were American B-17 bombers flying into Hawaii. In the aftermath of the attack, Paul and a number of ranking officers come under much scrutiny for the failure to alert the military forces on Hawaii. Combined with other issues like torpedo nets not being in place and watertight doors not being closed on the warships anchored in Pearl Harbor, historians have been debating for almost seventy years whether there was a political or military conspiracy to ensure that the attack was successful, thus forcing the U.S. into war. After the war ended in 1945, these allegations continued, leading to Congressional investigations as both political parties tried to smear each other with the blame. The author does a fine job of exploring the conspiracy theory and weaving it into his novel as an intriguing element of the story.
My only negative comment about "Peter, Paul, and Pearl" is that in a few sections, the formatting for the Kindle was off, leaving some lines of text very short. This was a bit distracting, but not enough to affect my enjoyment of the book.
"Peter, Paul, and Pearl" is the first book of a trilogy, and I'm definitely planning to read the other two novels. However, the book isn't one of those "to be continued" sagas where you have to keep reading the series to get any resolution to the story. It could easily be read as a standalone story, since it has a very satisfying ending that ties up all the loose ends.
The bottom line: Two thumbs up for some first rate historical fiction.

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The central theme of this novel is an adulterous love affair during World War II; it is about the maturation of the main characters. Paul is a young Army officer;Betty is the wife of a naval officer, Eric; they have a six-year old daughter, Rosalie.Paul and Betty witness the attack on Pearl Harbor.Betty then goes to Washington, D.C., to work as a civilian for the Navy, learning self-reliance.Eric goes into combat.Paul is stationed in D.C.; he and Betty continue their tortured love affair.Paul then takes part in the Normandy D-Day landing and the Battle of the Bulge, maturing as an officer. As the War ends, the Republican Party tries to bribe or coerce Paul into joining in its attempt to blame the Democrats for the surprise at Pearl Harbor.A mysterious colonel in the Pentagon sides with Paul.At the same time, Paul and Betty risk his career and her custody of the child (and the child's happiness) by revealing their love. T

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