Saving Fish from Drowning

[Christen]

Am I alone in this? I tried...tried so hard....to read this for a book club. But I ended up skipping more and more. I kept thinking "Surely there is a reason why this book is so darn long", "Surely all this 'character development' is going somewhere", "Surely this book can't be this bad...it's got to get better". It never did. It was just a whole bunch of rambling with characters who I couldn't relate to in the least bit and descriptions of travel that were way overblown. Hey, Amy Tan, if I wanted to take a trip to Asia, I will do it myself, thank you! I don't need you describing it in minute detail!!!

The only remotely interesting thing about this book was the narrator's death and trying to figure out what happened to her. This is the only book I've ever wanted to go out and find every copy of and burn them. Ugh. Pain.

[Norman]

No, you are not alone! I agree with everything you said about this horrible novel. It was a silly plot and never, ever achieved some of the pathos and insight that Tan gave us in The Joy Luck Club. The only good point of the book was that it was so lightweight I could skim the final 200 pages in about 30 minutes and get on to some better summer reading!

[Lianne]

I agree with you! I usually enjoy Amy Tan, but I just could not get through this book. Really unfortunate, because I thought the concept was really interesting. But the book dragged and dragged. I wanted to find out how the narrator died, but wasn't even invested enough in that question to finish the book. Sad!

What happened to the narrator?

[Christen]

She's reaching for this hair comb up on a shelf and loses her balance and falls on it or something. Really lame! Especially with how interesting the mystery was set up to be.

Oh and did anyone else find EVERY character in that book extra super mega pretentious?