Book review: A Hope More Powerful Than the Sea: the Journey of Doaa Al Zamel by Melissa Fleming

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A Hope More Powerful Than the Sea book coverI’m a little unsure how to feel about this book. Melissa Fleming is a UNHCR bigwig and she wanted to draw attention to the plight of refugees by highlighting one true story. The one she chose is a doozy. A Hope More Powerful Than the Sea: the Journey of Doaa Al Zamel is an action-packed and informative tale. But right from the start I had some concerns.

Doaa Al Zamel had certainly been through the wringer by the time Fleming met her. She is Syrian, an educated young woman from a middle-class family. She had a place waiting for her at university in Damascus and took place in anti-government demonstrations during the Arab Spring, until the civil war made life intolerable in her home city Daraa.

The Al Zamel family fled to Egypt, where they were initially well looked after, before the sheer number of refugees turned the tide of public opinion and national policy. Doaa and her fiance – a fellow Syrian refugee she met in Egypt – tried to escape across the Mediterranean via people smugglers no less than three times before her final horrific journey ended in one of the worst shipwrecks in the Mediterranean. Doaa became a minor celebrity as the Italian press lauded her role in saving a baby.

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February 2023 reading round-up

I mostly hibernated in February. Usually with the dog snuggled up next to me or on my feet. Which is lovely but I also feel guilty that I left the house so little. It’s not unrelated that spring seems to be just barely getting started a month later than usual this year.

There is one new thing in my life – I’ve started playing D&D! About 18 years after Tim started playing D&D and telling me how great it is, I’m finally giving it a try. Two sessions in, I really enjoy it.

And now it’s March. Happy St David’s Day.

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Book review: Brown Baby by Nikesh Shukla

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brown baby book coverJust when I’ve got used to the recent trend of memoirs written in the form of a series of essays, journalist and novelist Nikesh Shukla adds a new twist in his book Brown Baby. While each chapter takes a different topic from his own life, they are not essays but instead letters to his eldest daughter, affectionately nicknamed Ganga. 

Except that his daughter is still young (under 10, I believe) so she most likely won’t be reading this book for a while yet. It’s certainly not written as though it’s intended for primary-school-aged children and Shukla acknowledges a few times that his intended audience won’t be his first reader, that she will come to it in several years’ time, if at all.

So why this format? It’s a hook, of course; not many books are written in second person. And it was probably a useful exercise for Shukla to organise his thoughts when approaching writing this. But it does also add a layer of meaning for us readers who aren’t children of Shukla’s. Initially it feels intrusive, like this is genuinely a personal letter from a father to a daughter, in which he opens up to her for possibly the first time. But once I got past the feeling I was eavesdropping, I think the format made this more impactful.

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K-drama review: Suspicious Partner

Suspicious Partner
Ji Chang-wook and Nam Ji-hyun play lawyers in Suspicious Partner.

Yup, K-drama did it again – they managed to combine a genuinely tense murder mystery with a sweet, silly romance and come up with a result that’s entertaining. Suspicious Partner (SBS 2017) is about two lawyers who fall in love – and at the end of the first episode, one of them is arrested for murder.

Noh Ji-uk (Ji Chang-wook) is a prosecutor and Eun Bong-hi (Nam Ji-hyun) is a lawyer who briefly works for him during her training. There is a clear spark between them but they are both smarting from having been cheated on by long-term partners and are wary of new love. Then Bong-hi’s ex-boyfriend is found dead in her apartment and his father – who happens to be the chief prosecutor – presses Ji-uk hard to charge Bong-hi with murder. It’s an inauspicious start for a romance.

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January 2023 reading round-up

Tricks for treats

I usually quite like January. It includes my birthday, for one thing. The concept of a fresh start is a nice idea, even if I rarely make any real change. Lots of people take a month off socialising so there’s good reason to stay at home reading books, watching TV and playing games. And though it’s still winter, the days are getting longer, the first spring flowers are coming through, and really not much can beat a crisp dry sunny winter day.

However, this month has been mostly grey and wet. There’s been a resurgence of COVID to add to all the other winter bugs doing the rounds, so half the people I know have been unwell or still are. And we said a final goodbye to my grandad, who died at the end of December. So it’s not been the best January.

My reading was, perhaps appropriately, mixed. I started strong, with a book I knew I would love – Taste by Stanley Tucci. I ended the month with another real-life tale, a story far more extraordinary but not as well written: A Hope More Powerful Than the Sea by Melissa Fleming. The difference? It wasn’t told by its protagonist, and there was no good reason for that. It distanced me from what should have been an incredibly powerful experience. Ah well. Not every book can be a winner.

I also watched the usual large quantity of films and TV. The last two films I saw were the best: The Wonder – a period drama on Netflix starring the ever-excellent Florence Pugh – and Apocalypse Now: the Final Cut. The former is a fantastically strange, thoughtful film. While the latter is of course completely unhinged, that being the point it is making. War is insane, full of pointless suffering and death. And seriously, 14-year-old Laurence Fishburne is just as amazing as all the more experienced actors around him.

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Book review: Taste: My Life Through Food by Stanley Tucci

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Taste book cover

I’ve had a soft spot for actor Stanley Tucci since his brief stint on ER, though I was aware of him before that. His food-and-travel TV show Searching for Italy is a true delight, a relentlessly positive journey around the gastronomic delights of probably my favourite cuisine, with the gorgeous backdrop of Italy’s stunning scenery.

Between making series one and two, Tucci wrote a memoir – Taste: My Life Through Food. As the title suggests, he tells his life story through memories of meals, foods, cooking and eating. Despite his fame and years of worldwide travel, family and home seem to be hugely important to Tucci – and central to both, for him, is food.

He says this emphasis on food is a legacy of his Italian heritage. It certainly sounds like his childhood home was filled with food far more delicious – and healthy – than his school friends’. A year of his youth was spent in Italy, a revelation of new foods and ingredients.

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My best reads of 2022 and goals for the year ahead

My trusty reading companion

I read some great books last year. Looking through my stats on Storygraph, I read 74 books, and gave 16 of them 4.5 stars or higher (out of 5). That’s pretty good going.

I read 17 books classified as LGBTQIA+, 9 sci-fi, 15 non-fiction (including 8 memoirs) and 12.5 books translated from another language into English (there was one short story collection in which about half were translations).

My top 10 books reflect those stats pretty well, except that no translations quite made it into the list (there were two that were very close contenders). I didn’t write full-length reviews of all of them, as that’s a habit I only got back into in the second half of the year, but I did enthuse about them all in my monthly reading round-ups. As well as to Tim at the time of reading (Tim helped me narrow down my longlist to 10 by commenting on which ones he remembers me talking about!).

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December 2022 reading round-up

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Snow day

We didn’t have the greatest December, or the most relaxing end to the year. I’m looking forward to a few days of doing very little before the new year starts in earnest. We did manage a few lovely walks in the woods; put up some Christmas decorations to make the house feel more cheerful on the long dark evenings; and treated ourselves to a lot of chocolatey and alcoholic tasty things. And the dog and I made the most of our one day of snow here in Bristol.

This month I finished a couple of books I spent all year reading in short segments, making it look like I read my usual amount, rather than a fair bit less than I’d hoped to. My favourite read of the month – and a contender for my top 10 of the year – was All the White Spaces by Ally Wilkes.

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Book review: The Mountains Sing by Nguyén Phan Qué Mai

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The Mountains Sing book coverSometimes a book breaks your heart but you love it anyway. For me, The Mountains Sing by Nguyén Phan Qué Mai hit that spot. It’s a novel about Vietnam through most of the twentieth century, told through one family.

After a very brief prelude, it opens in Hanoi in 1972. Twelve-year-old Hương and her grandmother Diệu Lan are running to a bomb shelter as the air raid sirens sound yet again. Hương’s parents and uncles have disappeared down the Ho Chi Minh Trail to fight in the war. Years later, Hương can only hope no news is good news.

Hương and her grandmother decide they must walk up into the mountains with only the food and clothing they can carry, in search of safety from the American bombs. They return months later to a devastated Hanoi and must piece a life back together, including literally rebuilding their home.

This tale is interspersed with the story of Diệu Lan’s childhood further south, in central Vietnam. Like Hương has experienced in her short life, Diệu Lan had a happy, comfortable home until a series of invaders culminating with the Japanese unsettled everything, and then came the blow of the North Vietnamese Communists, who took an extreme, violent approach to redistribution of wealth.

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Book review: How We Disappeared by Jing-Jing Lee

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How We Disappeared book cover

When a book gets a lot of hype on publication, it can be hit or miss whether I like it. Even a very good book can be spoiled by expectations that are too high. But How We Disappeared by Jing-Jing Lee is one of the cases where I absolutely agree with all the five-star reviews. This novel is excellent.

It’s set in Singapore, with two timelines. In the year 2000 two people are trying to uncover secrets from the Japanese occupation during the Second World War. Wang Di is an old woman who has her own terrible memories of that time. Kevin is a 12-year-old boy desperate to help his father by following up on his grandmother’s deathbed confession.

While both our lead characters have their struggles, the stakes are rather different. As the novel opens, Wang Di’s husband has just died, leaving her alone. She never learned to read, and scrapes a living by collecting scrap to resell for recycling. In her husband’s last days, Wang Di finally told him the story she had hidden for more than 50 years – though he guessed some of it the day they met. But he died before there was time for him to reciprocate – to tell her his own war story. Now Wang Di is filled with regret. And shame, as her neighbours laugh at her and call her names.

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