The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts in Settings

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Feb 11, 2011 Kayla rated it it was ok

Shelves: nonfiction, school, reviewed, memoir

2.5 stars

Maxine Hong Kingston writes a very imaginative memoir that ends with Kingston's discovery of her voice and her journey towards wholeness. She interweaves stories of her mother and her aunts, as well as Chinese legends (most notably, a unique take on the Fa Mu Lan legend) as told to her by her mother when she was a young girl. She includes many descriptions of Chinese traditions and behaviors, often comparing Chinese and American culture, which I found quite interesting. Her writing is b 2.5 stars

Maxine Hong Kingston writes a very imaginative memoir that ends with Kingston's discovery of her voice and her journey towards wholeness. She interweaves stories of her mother and her aunts, as well as Chinese legends (most notably, a unique take on the Fa Mu Lan legend) as told to her by her mother when she was a young girl. She includes many descriptions of Chinese traditions and behaviors, often comparing Chinese and American culture, which I found quite interesting. Her writing is beautiful. She uses a lot of creative license in this memoir.

The reason why my rating is not higher than it is is because this novel read very slowly for me. It would take me an hour to read 20 pages. I am not sure why that is. Perhaps I just wasn't in the right mood to read this memoir or maybe it was because it deviated so much from what I was expecting from a book classified as nonfiction (it could possibly be both these things since the two can be connected very easily). The author speculates a lot on the stories her mother told her and sometimes she will create her own fictional endings to the stories from her family history. She will imagine a story that she actually knows very little details of and make it into a complex narrative. The insertion of Chinese legends also takes away from the nonfictional aspects of the memoir. I know authors are given a creative license in their memoirs, but I think Kingston went a little overboard.

I also have a difficult time referring to this novel as a memoir. My definition of a memoir is an account of a significant moment in the author's own life, so I believed that Kingston would focus on herself and her experiences. However, she rarely talks about herself at all except in the last chapter. Instead, she chooses to focus on the women in her family, particularly her mother and two of her aunts (one from each side of her family). Most of the stories she recounts happened before she was born or were ones she wasn't there to witness first-hand. The stories are known to her second-hand, mostly told to her by her mother. This offered great insight into Chinese culture from around the early to mid-1900s, but I feel like I didn't get to know the author too well.

However, despite all of this, I would recommend this book. It is a beautifully written and imaginative piece of work. I may suggest reading it as a semi-autobiographical historical fiction novel rather than as a nonfiction memoir, though. ...more

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Aug 12, 2017 Gaijinmama rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction, classics, asian-american

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Jun 03, 2009 SandyC rated it liked it

Shelves: own-it

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