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THE HUNDRED SECRET SENSES

Tan again revisits the rich intersection of Chinese and American female sensibilities (The Joy Luck Club, 1989; The Kitchen God's Wife, 1991), this time layering her trademark home truths on the fragile foundation of an episodic century-old ghost story. Olivia is three years old when her dying father reveals that she has a half-sister back in his native China and asks her Idaho-born mother to retrieve her. Two years later, Kwan arrives to join the family in San Francisco. She's a noisy, affectionate teen who makes Olivia promise to keep her secret—namely, that she has "yin eyes" that allow her to see and communicate with the dead. Despite her pledge, Olivia tattles to her mother that the new sister stays up all night talking to—and telling her about—ghosts, at which point Kwan is promptly packed off for a brief stay at a mental institution. Now Kwan's almost 50, and still a boisterously loving, relentlessly intrusive presence in Olivia's life. She won't accept that Olivia's marriage to Simon is over and finally cajoles the estranged couple into accompanying her back to China. In her home village, then, the ghost stories Kwan's been telling for decades surge toward their climax—the love-interrupting murders of Kwan's past-life self and of her beloved American friend Miss Banner. Forced to share a bed, Olivia and Simon briefly reconcile, but then he disappears, leaving Olivia to fret over his fate while she also begins grudgingly to accept that she too remembers being killed among these cave-studded mountains. Despite Tan's supple prose and low-key humor, the Miss Banner strain of the story is overlong and uninvolving, and the inevitable then-vs.-now parallels feel more contrived than evocative. Still, fans should warm to the loving depiction of Kwan's old-world eccentricities and to the homespun precision with which the sisters' complex bond is illuminated.

Pub Date: Oct. 17, 1995

ISBN: 0-399-14114-6

Page Count: 368

Publisher: Putnam

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1995

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THE LOST FUTURE OF PEPPERHARROW

Although this sequel doesn’t break new ground, it will appeal strongly to fans of the first book.

More steampunk adventures of a samurai prognosticator, his clockwork octopus, and his human lovers.

Five years after her charming debut novel, The Watchmaker of Filigree Street (2015), Pulley brings back the main characters for another scramble through the dangers and consequences of clairvoyance. Readers of the first book already know the big reveal: that Keita Mori—the eponymous London watchmaker—has an unusual memory that works both backward and forward. (Readers new to the series should put this book down and start with Watchmaker.) This time Pulley sets the action principally in Japan, where Mori; Thaniel Steepleton, a British translator and diplomat; Grace Carrow Matsumoto, a physicist; and Takiko Pepperharrow, a Kabuki actress and baroness, are working together to foil a samurai’s power grab and turn away a Russian invasion. At least, that’s what Mori’s doing; the others are rushing blindly down paths he’s laid out for them, which may or may not get them where he wants them to go. But if Mori knows what’s coming and what steps they can take to change the future, why doesn’t he just tell them what to do? The answer is half satisfying (because, as in any complicated relationship, communication isn’t always easy; because the characters have wills of their own and might not obey) and half irritating (because if he did, there wouldn’t be much of a story). Pulley’s witty writing and enthusiastically deployed steampunk motifs—clockwork, owls, a mechanical pet, Tesla-inspired electrical drama—enliven a plot that drags in the middle before rushing toward its explosive end. Perhaps more interesting than the plot are the relationships. The characters revolve through a complex pattern of marriages of passion and convenience, sometimes across and sometimes within genders and cultures, punctuated by jealousy and interesting questions about trust.

Although this sequel doesn’t break new ground, it will appeal strongly to fans of the first book.

Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-63557-330-5

Page Count: 512

Publisher: Bloomsbury

Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2019

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THE OUTSIDER

Not his best, but a spooky pleasure for King’s boundless legion of fans.

Horrormeister King (End of Watch, 2016, etc.) serves up a juicy tale that plays at the forefront of our current phobias, setting a police procedural among the creepiest depths of the supernatural.

If you’re a little squeamish about worms, you’re really not going to like them after accompanying King through his latest bit of mayhem. Early on, Ralph Anderson, a detective in the leafy Midwestern burg of Flint City, is forced to take on the unpleasant task of busting Terry Maitland, a popular teacher and Little League coach and solid citizen, after evidence links him to the most unpleasant violation and then murder of a young boy: “His throat was just gone,” says the man who found the body. “Nothing there but a red hole. His bluejeans and underpants were pulled down to his ankles, and I saw something….” Maitland protests his innocence, even as DNA points the way toward an open-and-shut case, all the way up to the point where he leaves the stage—and it doesn’t help Anderson’s world-weariness when the evil doesn’t stop once Terry’s in the ground. Natch, there’s a malevolent presence abroad, one that, after taking a few hundred pages to ferret out, will remind readers of King’s early novel It. Snakes, guns, metempsychosis, gangbangers, possessed cops, side tours to jerkwater Texas towns, all figure in King’s concoction, a bloodily Dantean denunciation of pedophilia. King skillfully works in references to current events (Black Lives Matter) and long-standing memes (getting plowed into by a runaway car), and he’s at his best, as always, when he’s painting a portrait worthy of Brueghel of the ordinary gone awry: “June Gibson happened to be the woman who had made the lasagna Arlene Peterson dumped over her head before suffering her heart attack.” Indeed, but overturned lasagna pales in messiness compared to when the evil entity’s head caves in “as if it had been made of papier-mâché rather than bone.” And then there are those worms. Yuck.

Not his best, but a spooky pleasure for King’s boundless legion of fans.

Pub Date: May 22, 2018

ISBN: 978-1-5011-8098-9

Page Count: 576

Publisher: Scribner

Review Posted Online: March 4, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2018

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