The first-person narrator is Olivia Laguni, and her unrelenting nemesis from childhood on is her half-sister, Kwan Li It is Kwan’s haunting predictions, her implementation of the secret senses, and her linking of the present with the past that cause this novel to shimmer with meaniug--and to leave it in the reader’s mind when the book has long been finished.
TRULY MAGICAL... UNFORGETTABLE... The first-person narrator is Olivia Laguni, and her unrelenting nemesis from childhood on is her half-sister, Kwan Li It is Kwan’s haunting predictions, her implementation of the secret senses, and her linking of the present with the past that cause this novel to shimmer with meaniug--and to leave it in the reader’s mind when the book has long been finished.
HER MOST POLISltED WORK... Tan is a wonderful storyteller, and the story’s many slrands--Olivia’s childhood, her courtship and marriage, Kwanb ghost stories and village tales--propel the work to its climactic but bittersweet end.
TAN HAS ONCE MORE PRODUCED A NOVEL WONDERFULLY LIKE A HOLOGRAM: turn il this way and find Chinese-Americans shopping and arguing in San Francisco; turn it that way and the Chinese of Changmian Village in 1864 are fleeing into the hills to hide from the rampaging Manchus TtIE HUNDRED SECRET SENSES doesn’t simply return to a world but burrows rnore deeply into it, following new trails to fresh revelations.