The Hundred Secret Senses
Author: Amy Tan
Desc: The Hundred Secret Senses is an exultant novel about China and America love and loyalty the identities we invent and the true selves we discover along the way. 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 splendor squalor and violence of Manchu China. And out of the friction between her narrators Amy Tan creates a work that illuminates both the present and the past sweetly sadly hilariously with searing and vivid prose.