The Hundred Secret Senses
Amy Tan"Tan again revisits the rich intersection of Chinese and American female sensibilities (The Joy Luck Club, 1989; The Kitchen God's Wife, 1991), this time layering her trademark home truths on the fragile foundation of an episodic century-old ghost story." - Kirkus Reviews
Olivia Laguni is half-Chinese but typically American in her uneasiness with her patchwork family. And no one in Olivia's family is more embarrassing to her than her half-sister, Kwan Li. For Kwan speaks mangled English, is cheerfully deaf to Olivia's sarcasm, and sees the dead with her "yin eyes." Even as Olivia details the particulars of her decades-long grudge against her sister (who, among other things, is a source of infuriatingly good advice), Kwan Li is telling her own story, one that sweeps us into the splendour, squalor, and violence of Manchu China.
"[Readers of] The Hundred Secret Senses... will have the pleasurable sensation of settling down to hear a favourite storyteller tell a brand-new story with reassuring echoes of narratives they have already come to love." - Francine Prose, The Washington Post
And out of the friction between her narrators, Amy Tan creates a work that illuminates both the present and the past sweetly, sadly, and hilariously, with searing and vivid prose.