The Storm We Made by Vanessa Chan

 

Title: The Storm We Made

Author:  Vanessa Chan

Narrated by:  Samantha Tan

Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio

Length: Approximately 10 hours and 52 minutes

Source: Review Copy from Simon & Schuster Audio.  Thank you @simonandschuster #BookClubFavorites for the free books!

Do you like storms or do they make you nervous?  I have always loved rainstorms, which is probably why I became a water resources engineer.  I once had a professor say that you needed to lay in the grass in the rain to see how the water travels across the land to truly be a water resources engineer.

The Storm We Made by Vanessa Chan is a deep look into how World War II impacted the Malaysian people through the lens of one family mostly set in waning days of the war in 1945. This is told through four points of view from one family:

·       Cecily, the mother, tells her story ten years in the past.  In the present she lives under the guilt that in the past, she helped a Japanese spy to gather data from her husband.  Her husband worked for the public works department and his work provided targets to for the Japanese to hit to take over Malaysia.  She is excited by her work as a spy and the thought of getting rid of the British to have a free Malaysia.

·       Abel is Cecily’s only son.  He does not show up at home on his fifteenth birthday.  The country was experiencing the disappearance of many young men who were conscripted to build a railroad for the Japanese.  Abel faces unspeakable abuse.

·       Jujube is Cecily’s oldest daughter.  She works for a tea house and befriends a Japanese teacher who think she reminds him of his daughter back in Japan.  He is distressed about how the barbarian Americans targeted the innocents in the war with their atomic bombs, not realizing the hypocrisy on how the Japanese are abusing the Malaysian civilians.

·       Jasmin in the very young daughter, about seven years old in 1945.  She is innocent and spends much of her time locked in the basement so she will not be kidnapped for a Japanese comfort station.  She meets a new friend, and her life will never be the same.

What I liked about this book:

·       This book had me deeply ponder the horrors of World War II on the Malaysian people.  I did not previously know about how WWII impacted Malaysia. I will be thinking about this book for a long time.

·       The main characters were well developed, and I cared about them.  The secondary characters were also three dimensional, such as Bingley/Fujiwara (the Japanese spy), Mr. Takahashi (Jujube’s Japanese customer) Freddie (Abel’s best friend), and Yuki (Jasmin’s friend).

·       The storylines all combined at the end for a stunning conclusion.

·       I liked the map and brief Malaysia historical timeline at the beginning of the book.

·       The forward is very personal and lays the background for the novel.  “In Malaysia, our grandparents love us by not speaking.  More specifically, they do not speak about their lives from 1940-1945, the period when the Japanese Imperial Army invaded Malaya (what Malaysia was called before independence), toss ed the British colonizers out, and turned a quiet nation into one that was at war with itself.”

·       The narrator of this audiobook, Samantha Tan, was great and brought a different voice to the different characters.

Favorite Quotes:

“She relives the crack of pain that incapacitated her when she realized the price of this war was innocence, and the girls had paid, without knowing why.”

“Teenage boys had begun to disappear.” – Great first line.

Overall, The Storm We Made by Vanessa Chan is a World War II novel that shows the horror of the war in Malaysia, and I will be thinking about this one for a long time.