I couldn’t get into this book. I guess what I love about Tan is the mother-daughter thing. Once I realized she deviated from the usual theme I lost interest. She’s still my girl, though.

To be fair, I pretty much adore Amy Tan. There is something about the way she writes that touches a nerve with me every time, and I fall right into her books no matter how many times I read them.

Saving Fish from Drowning, though, is a whole new ballgame.

It’s amazing. It’s perceptive, intuitive, and breaks from her mother-daughter disconnect mold entirely. And it’s genuinely funny in parts. Touching, political, with hints of satire, but not enough to make your average north american world traveller more than just a little squirmy.

I mean… it has hints of Life of Pi about it. She claims at the beginning of the book that it is based upon both the real disappearance of some tourists in Burma, and that it’s based on a story narrated to a woman via automatic writing. So who knows – could it be true? 10 minutes of googling is inconclusive. But it could very well be.

The narrator, and indeed most of the characters, are delightfully sympathetically unsympathetic. There may be a few too many points of view… I had a hard time keeping characters straight at the beginning. But it all ties up so nicely, so happy-sadly… that I don’t mind at all.

I’m delighted by this book. Entirely.