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bermudaonion 's review for:
Burnt Shadows
by Kamila Shamsie
When Hiroko Tanaka was 21, she was living in Nagasaki and engaged to be married to Konrad Weiss. Things were difficult for them, though, because it was 1945 and people were leery of Konrad because he was German. When the atomic bomb is dropped on Nagasaki, Hiroko’s life is changed forever – she lost the love of her life and she is emotionally and physically scarred for life.
Hoping to forget the past and start all over, Hiroko immigrated to India a few years later. She stayed with Konrad’s half-sister and her family and meets and falls in love with Sajjad Ali Ashraf. Against impossible odds, Hiroko and Sajjad got married and made a life for themselves, through good times and bad.
It is really hard to write a synopsis of Burnt Shadows by Kamila Shamsie without giving too much of the story away. The book starts out slow, and although the pace really doesn’t pick up much, I found myself drawn to the book after a few chapters. Hiroko is such a strong female character and I really admired her ability to re-invent herself and her life when she needed to. She never told her son about her experiences in World War II because she wanted to protect him, but then he ended up getting caught up in some militant activity and she said,
"I wish now I’d told Raza. Told everyone. Written it down and put a copy in every school, every library, every public meeting place. But you see, then I’d read the history books. Truman, Churchill, Stalin, the Emperor. My stories seemed so small, so tiny a fragment in the big picture."
Passages like that really made me reflect on the past and the importance of remembering and learning from mistakes. It also reminded me that every person’s story is important.
I also learned a lot from Burnt Shadows. I’m kind of embarrassed to say I knew next to nothing about Pakistan and how it was formed and why there’s so much unrest in the area.
Burnt Shadows is really the story of two families whose lives are intertwined through the years and in five different countries and I thoroughly enjoyed reading about their triumphs and tragedies. My thoughts are inadequate to describe how much is in this book and the beauty of its words.
Hoping to forget the past and start all over, Hiroko immigrated to India a few years later. She stayed with Konrad’s half-sister and her family and meets and falls in love with Sajjad Ali Ashraf. Against impossible odds, Hiroko and Sajjad got married and made a life for themselves, through good times and bad.
It is really hard to write a synopsis of Burnt Shadows by Kamila Shamsie without giving too much of the story away. The book starts out slow, and although the pace really doesn’t pick up much, I found myself drawn to the book after a few chapters. Hiroko is such a strong female character and I really admired her ability to re-invent herself and her life when she needed to. She never told her son about her experiences in World War II because she wanted to protect him, but then he ended up getting caught up in some militant activity and she said,
"I wish now I’d told Raza. Told everyone. Written it down and put a copy in every school, every library, every public meeting place. But you see, then I’d read the history books. Truman, Churchill, Stalin, the Emperor. My stories seemed so small, so tiny a fragment in the big picture."
Passages like that really made me reflect on the past and the importance of remembering and learning from mistakes. It also reminded me that every person’s story is important.
I also learned a lot from Burnt Shadows. I’m kind of embarrassed to say I knew next to nothing about Pakistan and how it was formed and why there’s so much unrest in the area.
Burnt Shadows is really the story of two families whose lives are intertwined through the years and in five different countries and I thoroughly enjoyed reading about their triumphs and tragedies. My thoughts are inadequate to describe how much is in this book and the beauty of its words.