Sons by Pearl S. Buck

 

Title:  Sons

Author:  Pearl S. Buck

Narrated by:  Adam Verner

Publisher: Oasis Audio

Length: Approximately 14 hours

Source: Checked out with Libby through the Kewaunee Public Library.  Thank-you!

Do you like to read family drama books that carry the story through the generation?  If so, what books have you enjoyed in the past?  I loved the Kent Family Chronicles by John Jakes which tells the story of an American family from the Revolution through the twentieth century.

This summer I read The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck for my Back to the Classics book club at the Kewaunee Public Library. I learned it was part of a trilogy and I really wanted to see what happened next in the story.  I got the second book, Sons, on audiobook from the library and I greatly enjoyed it.

Sons picks up immediately after The Good Earth Ends.  In the Good Earth, Wang Lung starts as a poor farmer, but works his way up to becoming a very rich man in 19^th century China.  As he is dying, he implores his three sons not to sell the land.  At the start of Sons, he is still dying and his life is celebrated after it ends. 

All three sons are very different men.  The novel focuses primarily on the third son, Wang the Tiger.  In the first book, he had run off to be a soldier.  In this novel, he is able to get his two older brothers to fund his life as a warlord.  He has many adventures which include love, betrayal, and war.  He wants a legacy of his own through marriage and sons. 

I enjoyed the overall story and how it was very different than the first book.  I also enjoyed the exploration into Chinese culture.  The story was epic in grandeur, but I also liked how it showed that Wang Lung’s sons are following the decaying cycle of the House of Hwang before them.  I am very interested to read the third and final book in this trilogy.  Wang the Tiger’s son is also not taking the path he would like him to take.

I did miss the strong female characters that were in The Good Earth.  The female characters in Sons were not as well developed.  I did enjoy getting to see how life turned out for many of my favorite characters from The Good Earth, including Pear Blossom.

Adam Verner was a fine narrator of this audiobook.

The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck

 

Title:  The Good Earth

Author:  Pearl S. Buck

Narrated by:  Anthony Heald

Publisher: Blackstone Audio

Length: Approximately 10 hours and 37 minutes

Source: Purchased from Amazon.com

 

What book has a character in it that you have a love / hate relationship with?

Tonight, for my Back to the Classics Book Club at the Kewaunee Public Library, we are going to discuss Pearl S. Buck.  We all picked a Pearl S. Buck novel to read and share.  I was going to read Sons, which is the second book in the House of Earth Trilogy.  Then I realized it had been twenty or so years since I read the first book in the Trilogy, The Good Earth, and I didn’t remember much from it.  Therefore, I read The Good Earth instead.  The Good Earth is a Pulitzer Prize winning novel for 1932 and was the best-selling novel for both 1931 and 1932 in the United States.  Buck won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1938.  Buck grew up in China as the child of missionaries and wrote the novel while she lived in China using her firsthand observations of village life.  This novel brought a story of rural China to many people in the United States for the first time.

Wang Lung is a farmer in a rural village.  The novel starts the day of his marriage.  He is going to marry a woman named O-Lan who had been a slave at the House of Hwang.  Wang Lung and O-Lan have a good partnership with both working hard on the land.  Things are going well when a famine strikes.  They work through the hardship to become a wealthy family.

I liked the characters in this novel and the picture it captures of a rural village of China at an indetermined time (there are trains – late nineteenth or early twentieth century).  I like how it goes through about forty years of this family’s story.  I also enjoyed that the ending was a bit of a cliffhanger, so I do want to continue this trilogy by reading Sons. 

The love of the land was a constant theme through this story. I also liked how it showed that once the person that did all of the hard work has accumulated wealth, their descendants can find themselves destroying the family through their vices.  This was the end of the House of Hwang, and Wang Lung’s sons seem to be going down that same pathway.

The famine was brutal and devastating.  It was terrible to realize this happened several times during the farmers lifetime and they had no safety net to fall back on.

 The real hero of this story was O-Lan, and I felt very conflicted about Wang Lung.  He treats O-Lan terribly.  When O-Lan gives birth and then immediately goes out to the field to work. Wang Lung won’t even let her have a bit of time to rest, which did not endear him to me.  O-Lan is always selflessly working for her family only to be replaced by a concubine.  O-Lan has two small pearls that are her only special treasure.  Wang Lung takes them from her and makes them into earrings for his concubine.   O-Lan dies of cancer and Wang Lung is sad at the time but can’t help thinking about how unattractive he finds her.  I just wanted to smack Wang Lung.   He seemed to have problems with not being able to control himself around the ladies.  The other part I had a problem with was when his son told him that he liked a slave that they owned.  Then the 70-year Wang Lung decides that the 16-year-old slave is pretty attractive and takes her for his own concubine.  He then wonders why his son runs away.  I would run away too Wang Lung.    Thinking about it, Wang Lung is a good three-dimensional character with both good and bad traits.

Anthony Heald was a good narrator of this audiobook.  I enjoyed listening to it and found the story to be very engaging on my drives.

My Summer of Love and Misfortune by Lindsay Wong

Title:  My Summer of Love and Misfortune

Author: Lindsay Wong

Read by:  Nancy Wu

Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio

Length: Approximately 11 hours and 21 minutes

Source: Review Copy from Simon & Schuster Audio.  Thank-you!

What was the last novel that you read that made you laugh?  My Summer of Love and Misfortune was a delightful audiobook that I looked forward to listening to every day. 

Iris Wang is not having a good senior year.  She wants to spend her time shopping and smoking weed with her boyfriend, and she is shocked when this leads to failing her senior year and not being accepted into any colleges.  She also loses her boyfriend to her best friend and life looks pretty bleak.  Through it all, Iris is not sure why these things are happening to her and fails to see that she has put in zero effort in even learning the basics about her best friend and boyfriend.

Her parents ship her off to stay with her Uncle and his family in Beijing to learn how to speak Chinese and to learn proper Chinese behavior.  She had never heard of them before as he was her father’s illegitimate half brother and her father doesn’t really talk about his family.  She is very upset about being shipped off, but when she arrives in Beijing, she discovers that her Uncle and his family are very wealthy.  She tries to befriend her cousin Ruby, and she starts to find out family secrets.  What was her father trying to hide?  Will Iris ever think of anyone besides herself?

I thought it was interesting when Iris thinks about how everyone sees her outside and makes assumptions about her.  In China, everyone is shocked and dismayed that she looks Chinese, but can’t speak Chinese and knows nothing about the culture.  On the inside, she is American. In America, she looks Chinese and everyone assumes that she should be intellectual, hardworking, and smart getting into the best schools.  In reality, Iris could care less about school.  Iris slowly learns through the novel how to accept herself for who she is, and her family learns about acceptance as well.  It was interesting when Iris learns that her father was a lot like her growing up in China.

My Summer of Love and Misfortune reminded me of the Shopaholic books if they were centered on a Chinese American girl.  I also enjoyed the humor of the Shopaholic series.  This novel was Shopaholic meets Crazy Rich Asian.  Like Becky from the Shopaholic series, Iris is always trying to rationalize her bad behavior and overspending.  Unlike Becky, she does seem very selfish and doesn’t seem to care about anyone besides herself.  Luckily, at the end of the novel, Iris is able to learn to care about others and to see that she has had a pretty lucky life.

Narrator Nancy Wu was Iris to me.  I loved her voice and narration.

Overall, My Summer of Love and Misfortune is an entertaining audiobook.

The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane by Lisa See

Title: The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane
Author: Lisa See

Read by: Ruthie Ann Miles and Kimiko Glenn

Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio

Length: Approximately 14 hours and 7 minutes
Source: Simon & Schuster Audio Digital Review Copy – Thank-you!

Ethnic minority, the Akha, farm in remote mountains of China aligning their lives around the seasons, farming of tea, and traditions that have been passed down through millennia.  Li-yan grows up learning the traditions, but times change rapidly after the modern world finds them and wants their tea.  Li-yan faces many struggles including, how to keep the traditions alive while also moving forward in the world.  Her main struggle in life is having an illegitimate baby that she gives up for adoption.  She returns to get her child back from the orphanage only to discover she has been sent to American for adoption.  Will Li-yan ever be reunited with her child?  Will she be able to help out her village in the new and modern world?

I’ll admit, I thought this book was a historical fiction novel at first, and then was stunned to realize that Li-yan is only one year older than myself.  Then I questioned, am I old enough to be in a historical fiction novel at age 39?  I’m still wondering . . .

I learned a lot about China through this novel and it was all very interesting.  I had no idea that China has 55 ethnic minorities.  I also don’t know much about traditions or how modern day business in China works.  I learned a lot of tidbits through the narrative of the story and it left me wanting to learn so much more about China.

I love to learn about cultures around the world, but I must admit I was horrified by the traditions of the Akha people as it related to babies.  Any baby born with a defect, born early, or even as a twin (twins are considered evil and multiple births are something only animals should have) are killed immediately by their father and the parents are kicked out of the village.  Interestingly, Li-yan meets missionaries and is horrified by them and how they talk down to them about their traditions and call them evil.  It’s was an interesting take on what we think it evil and really made me think about this.  Is it more evil to be a missionary and take a woman’s child or give her a surgery unknowingly so she can no longer have any more children?  This book really made me think about how we judge cultures and how we ourselves can be judged.

I love tea so it was very interesting to me learning about tea traditions and how tea was harvested.  This was a major focus of the novel and I loved it.  It was interested how highly valued certain teas are and how Li-yan obtains education in this topic and is able to use it to help her village.  I like how tea is almost like wine with certain flavors, needing to be aged, etc.  I definitely need to learn more about this and try even more than I do now!  I also learned about the heroin trade in this novel sadly, but luckily this was just a side journey.

This book had a very interesting take on adoption as it tells a dual story about Li-yan and her child in America. Constance and Dan Davis adopt baby Haley from China.  She has difficulty adjusting as she doesn’t look like her adoptive parents and also doesn’t look like other Chinese children. Her parents don’t know why, but it’s because she’s from an ethnic minority.  It was interesting look on what is a parent?  Also interesting from the child’s point of view – why was I abandoned by my birth parents?  Why do I look different from my parents?  I really liked the bits of Haley’s life as she grew up, including a group counseling session.  I really liked how each character had a different actor voicing them.

This book was a very powerful story that I admit had me crying at the end.  I wanted the story to continue, but it had a satisfying conclusion that was followed by great music.  This was a very engaging story and I’ll admit to staying in my car a bit longer when I got home or to work to keep listening.  The narrators of the audiobook were outstanding and as I stated above, I really liked that Li-yan and Haley had their own voice, but I especially liked how events like the counseling session were read by a lot of different actors to make it sound like a real session.

Overall, The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane of was an extremely engaging and powerful story.  It really tugged on my heart strings and it was an outstanding audiobook.  Besides being very absorbed in the unique narrative, I also learned a lot about China, tea, and adoption.  This was a great book – one of my favorites of this year!