Reading year 2014: Amy Tan’s The Valley of Amazement is compulsively readable

It’s about Violet, the half-Chinese daughter of an American woman who runs a courtesan house in Shanghai. The Qing dynasty is falling, anti-foreign sentiment is rising, business is failing, and mother and daughter are fighting. Like mothers and daughters everywhere. There’s also a fat, cranky cat named Carlotta. We started reading it yesterday and now […]