Dreams of Joy

This will be a short review, mostly because there isn't a whole lot to really say about it that hasn't already been covered. Joy returns to China to seek her roots and her family, and gets wrapped up in all the fervor surrounding Red China in the late 1950s. She makes (many) poor decisions. Like mother, like daughter, I suppose.Joy spends most of the book being an unreliable narrator, where her poor decision-making skills are buried in her optimism and intentionally only seeing things at the commune she lives at in China the way she wants them to be seen. She genuinely seems to believe everything she's being told at the commune, which seems like a strange departure from the confident, world-experienced college student she was portrayed to be in the first book. Everything that happened to her felt very much contingent on her remaining (willingly or otherwise) oblivious to what's going on around her, and it was hard to really feel bad for her because of it.I'm glad I read the book to wrap up the events from [b:Shanghai Girls 5960325 Shanghai Girls (Shanghai Girls #1) Lisa See https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1327968416l/5960325.SY75.jpg 5991850], but ultimately neither book really felt really solid to me.