Lisa See, the author of [i]Snow Flower and the Secret Fan[/i], which was a really good book, has delivered a less interesting and slightly faded remix of the same themes Snow Flower had – namely, friendship and Chinese culture. The characters are wooden: good-girl Grace, scandalous Ruby, cantankerous Helen. The story limps along like a wounded homing pigeon, following the “glamour” of the Forties while skipping any of the realities of the second World War. (It does make an appearance, as do the Japanese internment […]
The Lights Are Going Out All Over Europe
I’ve been reading a lot of books that are set during World War II (and I haven’t even gotten to All the Light We Cannot See or Boys in the Boat yet) and this is the latest. Kristin Hannah’s novel focusing on the experiences of two sisters, Vianne and Isabelle, in France during the Occupation was a compelling read for me even though I felt I had seen/read a lot of this before. There has already been a lot of tragedy and upheaval in the […]
A Million Deaths is a Statistic
I’m a bit of an accidental war tourist. I never plan these things but somehow, I’ve been to the trenches of Verdun, the reconstructed city centre of Ypres, the Passchendaele memorial museum, the D-day beaches and their immense cemeteries, the former sites of concentration camps, the battlegrounds of Malmedy. It seems important somehow, especially for someone my age, several generations comfortably removed from any world war. Yet the sheer scale of these immense cemeteries and their endless lines of identical headstones alone makes it paradoxically […]