The Ending Of The Piano Teacher

Taking advantage of having an extra day for the weekend, I decided to sit down and finally finish the novel. To my surprise, Lee did an amazing job at exploring the characters and discussing a significant point in history when the Japanese were invading Hong Kong. Once the Japanese had entered China, many changes began to occur. For example, people were restricted to having only 500 calories a day. I also like how Lee made developed the type of society Hong Kong is as well. She always goes into detail about how the Chinese are unhappy that not everyone there is purely Chinese, which causes alot of uprising and chaos in the society. Although the author went into detail about the invasion, I felt that the emotion told about the characters was not as detailed. I would have liked to know more information about Melody and her sister, and what goes on. I have a feeling though that the reason why there was so much tention going on was that the sister was only tolerated in the society but was not fully respected since she was considered a non pure bredd. When reading this, I began to realize that many ethnic and racial groups today face the same problem, and learn more about the hardships that people must go through in order to survive within a society. The relationship between Melody and Claire to grow stronger as the novel progresses because in one part of the book, Claire decides to talk about Melody's weight loss and Melody responds to Claire by saying "fine, yes fine, not meeting Claire's eye. I must take better care of myself. Victor says I run around too much." Thus, it shows as if Melody does not want to deal with an issue that is bothering her, and she wants to keep her emotions to herself. Another aspect of their relationship that changed is that Melody is beginning to question whether or not Claire is enjoying her stay in Hong Kong. This complicated love triangle that Melody and Claire becomes more intense as the reader keeps reading on.....

This book was also confusing at parts, partly because it kept switching from the 1940's to the 1950's. The constant switching kept confusing me because it was hard to follow when certain events were happening. Also, I felt that the language was confusing because the sentences were very long and descriptive, causing me to become confused at parts. However, it was interesting that Lee gave us a perspective of World War II for Asia, instead of Europe, which is mainly what many historians focus on when discussing World War II.

If you are interested in a book that mainly deals with the events of World War I and learning about Asia during the 1940's and 50's then this is the book for you. You might also like this book if you don't mind reading a book that has slow beginning and middle but an exciting end to it!