50books_poc | 4. The Hundred Secret Senses, by Amy Tan

I’ve read one of Amy Tan’s other books, Saving Fish from Drowning, and I had much the same reaction to it and to The Hundred Secret Senses: entertained, delighted with her excellent prose and grasp of character, and a little stranded by the sense that the story hadn’t quite gone anywhere.

I don’t mean that it didn’t have a theme – The Hundred Secret Senses certainly does, that you shouldn’t be afraid of death or ruin your life by being stuck in the past – but that the plot is very thin. It meanders here and there, and all the meanders are interesting, but when I finish the book I realize that the distance between the beginning and end is so small that it doesn’t seem to justify four hundred pages.

While this kept me from loving The Hundred Secret Senses, I still liked it very much. The characters seem very real, very well-observed; it feels like these people could step off the page and live and breathe. Their hopes, their fears, their insecurities (oh, God, their insecurities; the main character, Olivia, is deeply insecure, and not that adorable movie heroine insecurity, either) – these are the engines that drive the book.

And if it doesn’t drive them as far or as fast as I would like – that’s my problem, not a problem inherent in the book; and its other strengths make up for it.