Reviews - Wave | The StoryGraph

759 reviews for:

Wave

Sonali Deraniyagala

3.84 AVERAGE

angelaac's review against another edition

4.0

emotional reflective relaxing medium-paced

Obviously this is a book about profound loss and grief, but it's not devastatingly sad. It's not unbearable to read; quite the opposite. Deraniyagala lets us in and takes us inside her grief, but somehow I found her story ultimately hopeful. She paints such a lovely, intimate picture of her family and the life they had together. In particular, the stories about her sons are vivid and funny. Deraniyagala shares Vik and Malli with us, and it feels like a privilege to know them through her eyes. Ultimately, Wave is a beautiful and intimate portrait of unthinkable loss, but not one that will tear you apart.

gngeeganage's review against another edition

4.0

challenging emotional sad medium-paced

beepuke's review against another edition

5.0

emotional reflective sad fast-paced

abhishekshetty's review against another edition

4.0

Sonali lost five members of her family in the deadly tsunami of 2005. This included her mum, her dad, her husband and her two sons. She was a successful academic with a happy family and then things came crashing down all of a sudden with the floods. The book looks at how she went brought various stages of grief and realized that to process this tragedy she had to keep them close rather than forget and let them go. Through Sonali’s journey we understand how fragile life can be and why we must value every human relationship and give the ones that matter our full love, attention and intense unconditional care.

sasanka's review against another edition

challenging dark

I tend not to rate memoirs, especially ones where the person was dealing with so much trauma, so I'm not giving it a star rating.

I did not connect with this, and didn't feel that engaged. I finished it because it was so short, but I was fairly bored for most of it. I read a huge range of books, and can connect with many people and characters who have wildly different life experiences, and yet couldn't connect in any way to this. It might be because Sonali feels so disconnected from the rest of the world, but I am not a stranger to grief, and expected to at least connect in that way, but somehow I didn't.