Reviews for The Opposite of Fate: A Book of Musings

The average rating for The Opposite of Fate: A Book of Musings based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2009-02-01 00:00:00 Michael Schwaab Reading this book is like sitting down to lunch with someone you hardly know and making a new friend. I happen to love Amy Tan's novels. I also like to read about writers and how they got their breaks. This memior/musings/essay book held a lot of the magic that is found in Joy Luck Club/Kitchen God's Wife with a lot of reality and the daily suffering of a writer. I particularly enjoyed reading about Tan's mother (but of course it's the crazy/hard-lifed mothers that make Joy Luck and Kitchen God's Wife so good) and about her path to making it as a writer. I also liked reading about how her mother made her sit down at the piano and practice for an hour every day even when she'd much rather be outside playing. I even liked reading about her thoughts on lanuage and how they formed who she is today, as a writer and generally as a person. There's a reason why people love Amy Tan--it's because she has the writing style to make you feel like she IS your best friend and that she's telling her stories to you, making you HER friend.

Review # 2 was written on 2013-05-15 00:00:00 Grant Lewandoski Amy Tan is one of the finest American writers we have. I am making it a point not to call her one of our finest women writers or Chinese-American writers or a writer of color, an issue which is explored in this memoir. This book may be a special taste -- you might need to be someone who loves her work and is interested in writing to fully appreciate it. Amy tells her stories with certainty and elegance and never overstates anything. I listened to this book which was all the better for having the author as the narrator as she imbues her prose with subtle inflections, careful pauses, rises and falls of volume. One particular instance comes to mind when she very carefully uses the word "racist". She also changes her voice when she reads words that came from her mother, an effect both humorous and touching. It was fascinating to learn what the true stories are that inspired her fiction as well as her surprisingly pleasant experience in Hollywood while making the film version of the Joy Luck Club. What a pleasure to read prose with such a refreshing perspective. To paraphrase Amy, she works so hard at making her work easy to read -- and listen to.