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flicker_black 's review for:
Wave
by Sonali Deraniyagala
dark
fast-paced
I went into the book with high expectations for some reason, expectations is a bit of exaggeration but I did think that it would hit close to home for some personal reason and the book was…….hmm I don’t know how to exactly put it.
The book was powerful as you would expect it with content like this, the author was brave in writing this and us readers couldn’t fathom the amount of struggle and liberation writing this would have caused here because most of us haven’t been in her shoes and so kudos to her.
Secondly one thing that I really like about this book was honest portrayal of grief, mostly when people write a book about grief, their personal experience with it, I have found them to be a bit too quick to get to the “how to process the grief” part, the book usually starts with the demise and then few paragraphs about how bad and hopeless and angry they felt but soon they start to talk about how grateful they are for the supper they had and it delves into cliches (not necessarily untrue or bad) like “I have learned that we the living are burdened with the sweet duty of carrying on the memories of those person who had departed from us, they aren’t dead completely till we keep them alive in our minds and lives”, so it reads like a self help book more often than not. I can sort of see why they would write it like that because mostly people reading it don’t want to read someone go on for pages and pages about them rotting on bed and stuffs but that doesn’t ring true for me because grief is messy, it isn’t pretty and it sucks, people process it very differently (which is why any criticism about this book is only from a reader point of view) but this book was direct and true.
There are few passages where the author sounds rude and disrespectful and idiotic, there is a scene where a kid rescued from the hurricane is sitting next to her but instead of extending sympathy she is thinking “you only survived because you’re fat but my kids were skinny, how would they have survived”, it sounds shocking, obscene but that’s also the truth, in hard situations like that we indeed turn bitter even to good people in our life who wants to help us, we lash out at them saying “well it’s not you who lost your loved ones”, even with years the pain was dulled but she never really gets past it because there usually is not straightforward getting over it, it’s not a bruise or scar to simply get over and so I liked how the author dealt with the subject with an unflinching attitude.
But overall I didn’t really like the book, it was too verbose for my liking and the author did come across as unpleasant (and rightfully so at times), and I was hardly about to be relate with her rich upbringing and stuffs and so there was a disconnect as a reader. Let me show you an example of the too wordy passage :
“Last evening I walked downtown along the Hudson at sunset, as I often do. I stopped on the boardwalk on Pier 46 to watch the orange light. There was a canopy of hysterical gulls over my head, the birds were spinning and swerving, no end to their agitation, it seemed. And standing there, I could enter another vista, see another river. The four of us on a Saturday afternoon at Butler’s Wharf, by the Thames. I am impatient, shooing along the boys who are dillydallying in the drizzle because they think Tower Bridge is about to open, any minute now.”
Like who even uses dillydallying!? Her experiences is posh places and her upbringing was read by me with a detached sense, as if I’m reading some piece of news of economics that I am not particularly interested about, so yeah not my cup of tea.
Rating 2.3/5.0
The book was powerful as you would expect it with content like this, the author was brave in writing this and us readers couldn’t fathom the amount of struggle and liberation writing this would have caused here because most of us haven’t been in her shoes and so kudos to her.
Secondly one thing that I really like about this book was honest portrayal of grief, mostly when people write a book about grief, their personal experience with it, I have found them to be a bit too quick to get to the “how to process the grief” part, the book usually starts with the demise and then few paragraphs about how bad and hopeless and angry they felt but soon they start to talk about how grateful they are for the supper they had and it delves into cliches (not necessarily untrue or bad) like “I have learned that we the living are burdened with the sweet duty of carrying on the memories of those person who had departed from us, they aren’t dead completely till we keep them alive in our minds and lives”, so it reads like a self help book more often than not. I can sort of see why they would write it like that because mostly people reading it don’t want to read someone go on for pages and pages about them rotting on bed and stuffs but that doesn’t ring true for me because grief is messy, it isn’t pretty and it sucks, people process it very differently (which is why any criticism about this book is only from a reader point of view) but this book was direct and true.
There are few passages where the author sounds rude and disrespectful and idiotic, there is a scene where a kid rescued from the hurricane is sitting next to her but instead of extending sympathy she is thinking “you only survived because you’re fat but my kids were skinny, how would they have survived”, it sounds shocking, obscene but that’s also the truth, in hard situations like that we indeed turn bitter even to good people in our life who wants to help us, we lash out at them saying “well it’s not you who lost your loved ones”, even with years the pain was dulled but she never really gets past it because there usually is not straightforward getting over it, it’s not a bruise or scar to simply get over and so I liked how the author dealt with the subject with an unflinching attitude.
But overall I didn’t really like the book, it was too verbose for my liking and the author did come across as unpleasant (and rightfully so at times), and I was hardly about to be relate with her rich upbringing and stuffs and so there was a disconnect as a reader. Let me show you an example of the too wordy passage :
“Last evening I walked downtown along the Hudson at sunset, as I often do. I stopped on the boardwalk on Pier 46 to watch the orange light. There was a canopy of hysterical gulls over my head, the birds were spinning and swerving, no end to their agitation, it seemed. And standing there, I could enter another vista, see another river. The four of us on a Saturday afternoon at Butler’s Wharf, by the Thames. I am impatient, shooing along the boys who are dillydallying in the drizzle because they think Tower Bridge is about to open, any minute now.”
Like who even uses dillydallying!? Her experiences is posh places and her upbringing was read by me with a detached sense, as if I’m reading some piece of news of economics that I am not particularly interested about, so yeah not my cup of tea.
Rating 2.3/5.0