Most Yale students get admitted through some combination of impressive academics, athletics, extracurriculars, family connections, and donations, or perhaps bribing the right coach. Yale’s secret societies hide a supernatural secret in this fantasy/murder mystery/school story. 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. 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. 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. 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. She won't accept that Olivia's marriage to Simon is over and finally cajoles the estranged couple into accompanying her back to China. Now Kwan's almost 50, and still a boisterously loving, relentlessly intrusive presence in Olivia's life.

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. 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. Two years later, Kwan arrives to join the family in San Francisco. 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.

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.

The Hundred Secret Senses by Amy Tan