How long does it take to read The Joy Luck Club?
Amy Tan, Gwendoline Yeo, Tsai Chin, Ronald Bass, Wayne Wang, Jordi Fibla
The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan, Gwendoline Yeo, Tsai Chin, Ronald Bass, Wayne Wang, Jordi Fibla takes about 5 hours 50 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 5 hours 50 minutes
A weekend read
First published 1989. 318 pages, about 87,450 words.
12 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 9 hours 43 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 5 hours 50 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 3 hours 39 minutes |
The page count is the median across 64 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
Four mothers, four daughters, four families, whose histories shift with the four winds depending on who's telling the stories. In 1949, four Chinese women, recent immigrants to San Francisco, meet weekly to play mahjong and tell stories of what they left behind in China. United in loss and new hope for their daughters' futures, they call themselves the Joy Luck Club. Their daughters, who have never heard these stories, think their mothers' advice is irrelevant to their modern American lives – until their own inner crises reveal how much they've unknowingly inherited of their mothers' pasts. With wit and sensitivity, Amy Tan examines the sometimes painful, often tender, and always deep connection between mothers and daughters. As each woman reveals her secrets, trying to unravel the truth about her life, the strings become more tangled, more entwined. Mothers boast or despair over daughters, and daughters roll their eyes even as they feel the inextricable tightening of their matriarchal ties. Tan is an astute storyteller, enticing readers to immerse themselves into these lives of complexity and mystery.
Content warnings (AI-checked, may be incomplete)
- sexual content
- death of a child
- suicide
- abuse
- war
Subjects: Chinese American, Chinese American women, Chinese American women in fiction, Chinese Americans, Chinese Americans in fiction, Death
