Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts

 Winner of the National Book Circles Critic Award in 1976

A five-part genre-bending work considering immigration, class, and Chinese-American identity, The Woman Warrior sketches a nuanced portrait of the artist as a young woman. Mixing together myth and memoir, fantasy and fact, Kingston reflects on her childhood, the lives of her mother and aunts, and her awakening as a writer. All five parts share common themes, from the cultural gap between Chinese immigrants and their children to the debilitating effects of American racism. The author writes precise, cool prose, and laces her work with caustic wit; the book reads as an engaging meditation on Chinese-American girlhood and womanhood, as well as an exploration of what it means to cope with ongoing trauma and gendered terror through storytelling. Kingston experiments with perspective and representation in inventive ways, and her debut rewards deliberate reading.

–Goodreads