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ClareR (5945 KP) rated Wandering Souls in Books

Mar 25, 2023  
Wandering Souls
Wandering Souls
Cecile Pin | 2023 | Contemporary, Fiction & Poetry
10
10.0 (1 Ratings)
Book Rating
Since reading Wandering Souls on The Pigeonhole, it has made it on to the Women’s Prize long list. And well-deserved it is too.

This is the story of a family who make it by boat to Hong Kong from Vietnam. At least Anh and her two brothers do. Their parents and younger siblings come after them and drown.

This is Anh’s story, and how she copes on their journey from Vietnam to Hong Kong, and then on to London where they settle permanently. It’s a story of loss, life-long trauma and the struggle to find security and happiness. It brought home the continuing issues of refugees - particularly those who take the dangerous route of the sea. It always makes me think of these lines from Warsan Shire’s “Home”:
“You have to understand that no one puts children in a boat
Unless the water is safer than the land”
Anh and her family want a better life than that of poverty, war and political oppression.

This is a dark story and the experiences have such a huge effect on every aspect of Anh and her brothers lives, and you can still see this in the interactions that Anh has with her own children.

It’s a wonderful book, and well worth reading. I’ve learnt so much about the Vietnamese people who resettled in the UK and their journeys here.

I wouldn’t be at all disappointed to see this make the short list.
  
Hunters of the Dead
Hunters of the Dead
Steve Hockensmith | 2023 | Mystery
9
9.0 (1 Ratings)
Book Rating
Finding a Killer Among the Bones
For their first assignment as part of the A.A. Western Detective Agency, Old Red and Big Red are being sent to Wyoming to help with security at a dinosaur dig. You wouldn’t think it would be a hot bed of crime, but as the brothers learn when they arrive, there is another group of paleontologists nearby, and the two groups do not get along at all. Still, keeping watch in the middle of the night sounds like a boring job, until Old Red finds a dead body. Will he figure out what happened before a killer strikes again?

It’s been several years since the previous book in this series came out, but it wasn’t long before I was back in this world. And it was delightful to return. As always, the plot seems to wander a bit, but at the end, we see that everything was important. I love watching Old Red weave everything together to solve the case. Likewise, the characters come to life as the book goes along. I appreciate the humor we get along the way. With the setting, it’s no surprise that we get a little more foul content than I typically read, but it feels realistic. This book teases the next case for the brothers, and I hope we get it soon. But for now, fans will be glad the series is back. If you haven’t tried these books yet, I recommend you change that today.
  
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ClareR (5945 KP) rated Emily Eternal in Books

Apr 12, 2022  
Emily Eternal
Emily Eternal
M G Wheaton | 2019 | Dystopia, Romance, Science Fiction/Fantasy, Thriller
8
8.0 (1 Ratings)
Book Rating
Emily Eternal is a lot of what I love about science fiction. M. G. Wheaton has taken something that is pretty unbelievable (the end of the sun five billion years early) and made it perfectly believable. That, and the sentient computer programme, Emily.

Emily has been developed in order to help humanity. Primarily, she is supposed to counsel people who had been through trauma - and there’s a lot of it going around with all the impending doom, climate catastrophes etc. But this counselling has been used as a way of Emily teaching herself to become more human. She learns, constantly. I say “she”, because Emily is portrayed as a normal human being. She has daily routines, washes her hair, sleeps, eats. She learns from the people she counsels and watches through the various security cameras. And she forms attachments with her programmers and the other people she encounters.

But things go horribly wrong, and Emily escapes just in time. She is helped by her human companions for most of the book: Jason and Myra.

I don’t want to say too much more, because if you’re going to read this, I wouldn’t want to spoil it. It was a gripping story of a computer programme who has taught ‘herself’ how to care for humanity and to do her best for them. I loved it.
Recommended to all those who like Sci-Fi that’s light on the science and heavy on the personal relationships.