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em_wemily 's review for:
The Hundred Secret Senses
by Amy Tan
DNF
I made it to page 146 out of 358 and have to put this down. I am so terribly bored.
The plot idea isn't bad in general, but I really don't enjoy the execution. It's also hard for me in general to follow stories about people I don't care about.
Regarding the style, my biggest complaint is Kwan's dialogue. She speaks English with a big accent, which would be fine for me to read if her dialogue was presented as it often is in novels (new paragraph for each speaker, with time for other character to respond, etc.) but she goes on for entire monologues, in her highly stylized way of speaking, about people that I completely don't understand the significance of in the context of this story. It's confusing, boring, and constant.
*Note: In general, I don't like reading great lengths of highly stylized English. I think I had a similar experience when reading Huckleberry Finn and The Color Purple.
My other complaint regarding style is the excessive detail that just doesn't matter. For example, I don't need to know every single small detail of how women work in their day-to-day lives on Thistle Mountain. I don't really care about the minute detail of the house that Olivia and her husband bought, especially when the house doesn't even matter to the story's big picture. If these details matter, I want to know why.
The second big issue I have is with the other main narrator/character - Olivia. I find her to be very unlikeable. She's rude, unfairly judgmental of her family members, and has a freakish relationship with her soon-to-be-ex-husband. The constant presence of her partner's dead ex-girlfriend as a source of stress in their relationship is so weird and un-relatable, and while that might not necessarily be a deal breaker in fiction, I don't think Tan did a good job of making this set-up interesting enough or making Olivia sympathetic enough to keep me invested.
So between my dislike for Olivia as a character and my dislike for Kwan's dialogue, not to mention I still don't understand what Kwan's extremely detailed stories about living in China and encountering English missionaries have to do with Olivia's story, I have completely lost interest in continuing this book.
I made it to page 146 out of 358 and have to put this down. I am so terribly bored.
The plot idea isn't bad in general, but I really don't enjoy the execution. It's also hard for me in general to follow stories about people I don't care about.
Regarding the style, my biggest complaint is Kwan's dialogue. She speaks English with a big accent, which would be fine for me to read if her dialogue was presented as it often is in novels (new paragraph for each speaker, with time for other character to respond, etc.) but she goes on for entire monologues, in her highly stylized way of speaking, about people that I completely don't understand the significance of in the context of this story. It's confusing, boring, and constant.
*Note: In general, I don't like reading great lengths of highly stylized English. I think I had a similar experience when reading Huckleberry Finn and The Color Purple.
My other complaint regarding style is the excessive detail that just doesn't matter. For example, I don't need to know every single small detail of how women work in their day-to-day lives on Thistle Mountain. I don't really care about the minute detail of the house that Olivia and her husband bought, especially when the house doesn't even matter to the story's big picture. If these details matter, I want to know why.
The second big issue I have is with the other main narrator/character - Olivia. I find her to be very unlikeable. She's rude, unfairly judgmental of her family members, and has a freakish relationship with her soon-to-be-ex-husband. The constant presence of her partner's dead ex-girlfriend as a source of stress in their relationship is so weird and un-relatable, and while that might not necessarily be a deal breaker in fiction, I don't think Tan did a good job of making this set-up interesting enough or making Olivia sympathetic enough to keep me invested.
So between my dislike for Olivia as a character and my dislike for Kwan's dialogue, not to mention I still don't understand what Kwan's extremely detailed stories about living in China and encountering English missionaries have to do with Olivia's story, I have completely lost interest in continuing this book.