Joan is Okay

Locations
Call Number: Fiction / Wang, Weike, Adult Book / Fiction / General / Wang, Weike
On Shelf At: Downtown Library, Malletts Creek Branch, Traverwood Branch, Westgate Branch

Location & Checkout Length	Call Number	Checkout Length	Item Status
Downtown 2nd Floor 4-week checkout	Fiction / Wang, Weike	4-week checkout	On Shelf
Downtown 2nd Floor 4-week checkout	Fiction / Wang, Weike	4-week checkout	Due 04-20-2024
Malletts Adult Books 4-week checkout	Adult Book / Fiction / General / Wang, Weike	4-week checkout	On Shelf
Malletts Adult Books 4-week checkout	Adult Book / Fiction / General / Wang, Weike	4-week checkout	On Shelf
Traverwood Adult Books 4-week checkout	Adult Book / Fiction / General / Wang, Weike	4-week checkout	On Shelf
Traverwood Adult Books 4-week checkout	Adult Book / Fiction / General / Wang, Weike	4-week checkout	On Shelf
Westgate Adult Books 4-week checkout	Adult Book / Fiction / General / Wang, Weike	4-week checkout	On Shelf
Westgate Adult Books 4-week checkout	Adult Book / Fiction / General / Wang, Weike	4-week checkout	Due 05-01-2024

"Joan is a thirtysomething ICU physician at a busy New York City hospital. The daughter of Chinese parents who moved to America to secure the American dream for their children, Joan is intensely devoted to her work, happily solitary, successful. She does look up sometimes and wonder where her true roots lie: at the hospital, where her white coat makes her feel needed, or with her family, who try to shape her life according to their own cultural and social expectations. Once Joan and her brother, Fang, were established in their careers, their parents moved back to China, hoping to spend the rest of their lives in their homeland. But when Joan's father suddenly dies and her mother returns to America to reconnect with her children, a series of events sends Joan spiraling out of her comfort zone just as her hospital, her city, and the world are forced to reckon with a health crisis more devastating than anyone could imagine. Deceptively spare and quietly powerful, laced with sharp humor, Joan Is Okay touches on deeply resonant matters: being Chinese American right now, working in medicine at a high-stakes time, being a woman in a male-dominated workplace, and saying independent within a tight-knit family. But above all, it's a portrait of a remarkable woman so marvelously surprising that you can't get her out of your head"--Dust jacket flap.

REVIEWS & SUMMARIES

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COMMUNITY REVIEWS

Great read! submitted by mmohal on June 10, 2022, 10:33am Character development for this novel was spot on and it uses the life of Joan and events to reveal more and more about here. I only knocked it 1 star because I felt that the ending was a bit abrupt and left me wanting more.

About COVID submitted by russelan on June 20, 2022, 8:09pm I went into this not realizing it would deal so heavily with COVID and found myself mad reading that part - I was not the headspace for it. I recognize I probably could have avoided this if I had read through the synopsis. While I enjoyed some ideas in this book, I just couldn't get into it.

Refreshing But Lackluster Ending submitted by LMahlmeister on July 18, 2022, 3:22pm I really enjoyed the majority of this book, which touched on themes of race and racism, life in the medical world as COVID just started, family bonds, and fulfilling expectations. The ending, however, fell kind of flat for me. It just seemed to build up to nothing.