SOURCE: A review of The Woman Warrior, in Iowa Review, Vol. 10, No. 4, Autumn, 1979, pp. 93-8.

In the following review of The Woman Warrior, Homsher lauds the volume and analyzes Kingston's fictionalized approach to autobiography.

Reading The Woman Warrior, one gets an immediate impression that its writer has worked hard to form the book. Her memories of a Chinese-American girlhood in California are spliced with myths and anecdotes told by her imposing and thoroughly Chinese mother. Chapters are arranged in blocks against opposing chapters, some gaps bridged with cries of self-doubt or victory, while others are left for the reader to interpret. Kingston breaks up time as she breaks up the usual distinctions between fact and fantasy, and in doing so, separates her book from more traditional, chronological autobiographies. Her first chapter relates and then embroiders a story that was told by her mother, Brave Orchid, when Kingston first...