emma's Reviews > The Storm We Made

i was so excited to read this book, which is so many of my favorite things: women who spy! family drama! historical fiction about an under-discussed geopolitical moment!

its purpose — to show WWII and the era leading up to it from the british- then japanese-ruled malaysian perspective — is excellent.

unfortunately, the way this book conveyed it undermined the message.

so much tragedy occurs here. violence of every type, deaths of multiple main characters, colonization, war, labor camps, comfort stations, racism, sexism, assaults, murders, torture. it's wrenching and difficult to read.

that isn't a con of this book, obviously. all of those things really happened, and the forgotten stories of the people that experienced it deserved to be told.

it's the fact that these don't feel like real people, or real stories. our characters kill people without regret. they see untold horrors and don't feel them. they keep unforgivable secrets, commit crimes, experience trauma, and give none of it a second thought. characters change from page to page, and motivations, development arcs, and things we hold to be true aren't consistently upheld.

there is nothing that will allow us to ground ourselves in order to really feel these stories as they deserve to be felt. a character who can't pick up a stick in one paragraph is running across a camp and doing his own stunts in the next. 4 people we've been following for hundreds of pages die within one chapter. these people do terrible things without the painful justification that would allow us to feel it alongside them.

bad things happen for no reason, to people who don't feel real—nor does their suffering, keeping us on the outside as one horrible scene after another unfolds.

bottom line: i am glad this story is being told. i wish it was better equipped to be shared.

(thanks to the publisher for the copy)