The Valley of Amazement by Amy Tan

One has to wonder what kind of relationship Amy Tan had with her own mother, because so many of her novels concern mother-daughter problems, beginning with her first best seller, The Joy Luck Club. This one tells a multi-generational story -- Lucia is a privileged American girl who feels ignored by her mother and escapes as a teenager to Shanghai to follow her infatuation with a Chinese artist. Pregnant and unable to convince her Chinese sweetheart to defy family and tradition to marry her, she eventually becomes the madam of an exclusive courtesan house. Her child, the half-Chinese Violet, also enjoys a life of privilege, until she is separated from Lucia by an act of trickery. Wrongfully blaming her mother for the separation, Violet is forced to become a "virgin courtesan," the privilege of deflowering her belonging to the highest bidder. After she bears a daughter, Flora, the child is taken from her by quasi-legal means and carried off by the father's family. Not remembering her true mother, Flora is reared as the daughter of her birth father's American legal wife.

Amid this tangled family history is the search for love by the three daughters, particularly of the missteps and tragedies of Violet. The many details about her courtesan life are extremely interesting quite apart from their pertinence to the plot.

I could nit-pick this novel to death for its faults in my eyes: the characters often behave quite illogically; Violet's story contains so many misadventures that it becomes picaresque and unbelievable; the pace is slow and detailed until near the ending, when it all wraps up in a rushed and summarizing manner. But all this becomes almost beside the point, because Amy Tan is such a good storyteller, and this is a fascinating story. It's not "literature for the ages," but it is first-class entertainment.