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Book review: The Valley of Amazement, by Amy Tan

By Jane Westaway In Books

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12th December, 2013
Labelling a novelist a storyteller can be a thinly disguised put-down. A way of saying, yes, you’ll be hooked by the plot, but don’t expect stylish prose. Once, though, Amy Tan ably filled both roles. Her early novels, kicked off by 1989’s The Joy Luck Club, hit best-seller lists by showing the two worlds of Californian Chinese immigrants and the community they had left behind in a faux-vernacular voice rich with exotic idiom. In her latest novel, The Valley of Amazement, Tan’s chief narrator is Violet, the stroppy illegitimate offspring of American Lulu and Chinese ...

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