In the following review, Cheng lauds The Kitchen God's Wife, stating, "The ending, with its extraordinary convergence of all that has gone on before, is a marvel."

Yes, it's true: Amy Tan has done it again—with searing clarity of vision she has spun a tale that lyrically weaves past and present, myth and memory. And she has written a true novel this time, one sustained story that lasts all of some four hundred pages.

For the many who read her first book, The Joy Luck Club, the second opens on familiar territory— Pearl is the grown daughter of a very Chinese mother, Winnie, who speaks English with the snappy cadence and salty metaphors of her native tongue and whose way of thinking—of linking the visible and the invisible worlds—has come with her across the Pacific to the San Francisco Bay Area.

While Winnie still...