Javier's Reviews > The Hundred Secret Senses

** spoiler alert ** How shall I say this? The main protagonist/narrator of this book is a jerk. A giant one. I don't understand for a moment why it takes almost losing her husband and actually losing her sister for her to stop being a jerk for more than 10 minutes, but it does. This is probably also why I don't generally like romantic comedies. I expect everyone to have figured out how to be compassionate or at least somewhat emotionally intelligent by the time they've reached their mid-30s...which doesn't seem like too much to ask, does it?
The secondary protagonist, the main character's sister, was delightful. Overbearing, sometimes, yes. It's a simple narrative trick of the author, but very illustrative that when she switches from narrating in somewhat broken english to chinese, her language becomes deeper, richer, occasionally even rather poetic. Actually, I wish the entire novel had been about her and her life (lives?) in China.
With the exception of the (horribly cliche) ending, Amy Tan manages to keep this book interesting throughout, and to circumvent predictability with little twists and turns that kept me reading late into the night and early into the morning.