Radical Reads is an online book club hosted by the Boston Public Libary focusing on literature that critiques and challenges current feminist topics.

Join us on June 15 for a vibrant discussion of Weike Wang's Joan is Okay, following a young woman struggling to decide if everything she’s been told and is doing in life — working hard, listening to her family — is truly what she actually wants to be doing.

All book club titles are available as print books, eBooks, and audiobooks. For more information on using our online books, please visit the BPL's Stream and Download page.

About the Book:

Joan is a thirty-something ICU doctor at a busy New York City hospital. The daughter of Chinese parents who came to the United States 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 by their own cultural and social expectations.

Once Joan and her brother, Fang, were established in their careers, her 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 have imagined.

Deceptively spare yet quietly powerful, laced with sharp humor, Joan Is Okay touches on matters that feel deeply resonant: being Chinese American right now; working in medicine at a high-stakes time; finding one’s voice within a dominant culture; being a woman in a male-dominated workplace; and staying independent within a tight-knit family. But above all, it’s a portrait of one remarkable woman so surprising that you can’t get her out of your head.

"Wang’s narrative is at once laser-focused and multilayered. She raises provocative questions about motherhood, daughterhood, belonging and the many definitions of “home.” What do we owe our parents? Our children? And are any of us OK?" -Deesha Philyaw, New York Times

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