The Kitchen God's Wife by Amy Tan

It was even heavier than I expected.

This story has two plotlines: one of them takes place in modern days (well, it was written back in 2001, not so modern anymore) in the US and the other one back in the 1930s-1940s in China. In modern times there is a woman named Pearl, a daughter of Chinese immigrants, who can't tell her mother about her multiple sclerosis, and her mother, Winny can't tell her about her life back in China when she was younger. Winny's friend, Helen, is convinced she will die soon. She encourages Winny to tell her story to Pearl, because both Helen and Winny keep each other's secrets from the past, and Helen doesn't want to die with all these untold stories.

I love how both Winny and Helen aren't these pure good heroic women, they both your regular annoying grannies, they aren't pleasant people, they definitely very far from being woke and self-conscious. It's a thing I love in historical fiction: I prefer to read about regular people, who aren't "I'm not like other girls, I'm different", they are just part of society, with all its bullshit in their heads. In my opinion, it's a more honest way to portray main characters in historical fiction, without making them woke and modern to make them more relatable to the modern audience. Winny tells us a couple of times how she believed in everything society told her and how she can't imagine doing something differently. She was in an abusive relationship with her husband, but she believed it's "ok" and she needs to deal with it. Amy Tan is very good at portraying abusing relationships and how an abused person can't escape them, and how patriarchy makes it extremely easy for women to enter abusive relationships and hard to escape them. Also, this book explores this weird kind of friendship that forms because of circumstances not because of common interests and so on. I rarely see relationships like this in the media.

A big part of the book dedicated to describing the main characters' life during WWII. It doesn't have any "horrors of war" in a way they usually described in the literature, but this part of the book reminds me a lot about stories my grandmother told me. Especially in the part where they were under air attack so frequently, they stop caring.

For my full enjoyment, this book was too heavy on the historical fiction side. Usually, I love this type of the story, "thank god we live in the 21st century" (I wanted to write "2020" but with everything going on in the world I'm not sure anymore), but usually I prefer historical fiction mixed with something: detective, thriller, romance or fantasy.

Also, for me the plot in the present time was a bit underdeveloped, it pales in comparison to Winny's plot. The relationship between Winny and Pearl was extremely believable, but I think their conflict ended too quickly (especially after this rich and nuanced story of Winny). But overall writing was good and I really liked the main characters and their complicated relationships.

4 out of 5 stars.