Book Review: The Hundred Secret Senses

A Fair Trade Book



Title: The Hundred Secret Senses

Author: Amy Tan

Author's web site: https://www.amytan.net/

Date: 1995

Publisher: Ballantine / Putnam

ISBN: 0-8041-1109-X

Length: 399 pages

Quote: “I didn’t want Kwan as my sister.”

The narrator, Olivia, didn’t want a sister, period. Her long-dead father, her stepfathers, and her brothers took up enough of her ditzy mother’s attention, as far as she was concerned, at age five. And then, when Kwan was finally allowed to immigrate from China, she was an awful, spooky, kooky sort of sister, obsessed with the ghosts and past-life memories in which she devoutly believes, always speaking English badly, always telling Olivia stories Olivia didn’t particularly want to hear about repulsive bits of Chinese history, always calling Olivia “Libya” even though she’s able to say “Olivia.”

By the time this novel was written we all knew Amy Tan wrote female-bonding stories, so no points for guessing that, although this story takes place during a rift between grown-up Olivia and her husband, it’s about how Olivia finally learns to appreciate Kwan. Who may not really be her sister, after all, any more than she may or may not really have been Olivia’s best friend in their latest past life in the nineteenth century; Olivia comes around to the point of view that what matters is that Kwan thinks these things are true, and acts accordingly.

How Kwan wins Olivia’s respect and Olivia finds inner peace, you’ll have to read the story to find out. The question is: will reading The Hundred Secret Senses help anybody out there appreciate a relative who seems more mentally inadequate than she or he really is? I can’t say. The relative who took that prescription medication that “made some people nutso, but it only helped me talk to the spirits,” and the relative who developed such a complex about a throat injury that he refused to try to talk or read up into his twenties, had won my respect before The Hundred Secret Senses was written. Tan is preaching to the choir here.

She is, of course, a first-rate writer. The Hundred Secret Senses brings Northern California, and rural China, and the sisters’ real and imagined adventures, vividly to life; the real story and the past-life memory story are timed to blend cleverly together before the end of the book. There’s enough emotion to satisfy the chick-lit audience, probably enough fighting and sudden deaths and spelunking adventures and miscellaneous minor gross-outs to keep male readers awake too, and oh yes, although Tan spares the details, all four female protagonists are passionately heterosexual.

So, this book is recommended to: anyone who enjoys novels; anyone who enjoys only a few outstanding novels; and anyone who is willing to accept a little nudging in the direction of trying to appreciate an embarrassing relative. You can probably find a copy at a library, but even after you’ve read it, The Hundred Secret Senses is the kind of novel you just might want to buy for your children to discover and inherit.

The first edition, as shown in the picture above, is what I physically owned (and sold after posting an earlier version of this review on Associated Content). The first edition is becoming a collector's item. There is a new edition, which you'll get if you don't insist on the first edition, available as a Fair Trade Book for $5 per book plus $5 per package plus $1 if you pay online. (If you send a U.S. postal money order to the Boxholder, P.O. Box 322, the post office will collect its own surcharge. If you send a Paypal payment to the address you get by mentioning this book to salolianigodagewi @ yahoo, Paypal will take the extra money out of what the Paypal account receives.) Amy Tan is still alive, so all of her books up to Saving Fish from Drowning are Fair Trade Books: when you order them from this web site $1 per book, or more if you insist on a first edition, will be sent to Tan or a charity of her choice. At least four of the blockbuster novels that were reprinted as pocket-size paperbacks (The Joy Luck Club, The Kitchen God's Wife, The Bonesetter's Daughter, plus The Hundred Secret Senses and Saving Fish from Drowning) will fit into one $5 package and leave room for both picture books (The Moon Lady, The Chinese Siamese Cat), and if you ordered four novels plus the picture books Tan or her charity would receive $6.

This web site also recommends that readers go to amytan.net and order her new books as new books, if possible. I don't imagine Tan really needs the encouragement so much any more but as a writer, as an open-minded Christian, as a collaborator, as a role model for children of "blended" families, and as a survivor of Lyme Disease, she deserves it.