Not my favorite from Amy Tan. Some parts were so boring, I admit I only skimmed over them. The story spans 3 generations of mothers & daughters caught up in a mixture of Chinese and Western culture. It begins in the late 1890's. Lucretia Minturn is a defiant young woman growing up in San Francisco, the daughter of scholars. She meets a Chinese man who gets her pregnant. She follows him to Shanghai not knowing that his family will never allow them to marry. So it goes, on and on. I waded thru and finally finished, the ending was somewhat satisfactory