Shors weaves psychological intrigue by looking at his characters’ competing desires: love, revenge, and meaning. This novel has the aura of the mythic, the magical, and that which is grounded in history. “From page one of Beside a Burning Sea, you know you are in the hands of a master storyteller.
The survivors’ dignity, quiet strength and fellowship make this a magical read.” Shors pays satisfying attention to class and race dynamics, as well as the tension between wartime enemies. Ratu adds a colorful combination of winsome bravado, humor and childish fear each main character is similarly well-rounded, excepting the single-minded traitor among them, unsuspected by his fellow castaways. Jake, the engineer, is a black farmer who sees in Ratu the son he never had. Akira, a college professor pressed into service, is haunted by what he saw, did, and didn’t do at Nanking. They include the captain and an officer a Japanese prisoner, Akira, and two ship’s nurses he saved (one of them the captain’s wife) and the ship’s engineer, who saves a Fijian stowaway, Ratu.
hospital ship is torpedoed and sunk by the Japanese, a handful of survivors struggle for survival on a remote island. “Shors’ sophomore effort (following Beneath a Marble Sky), set on an island in the South Pacific during three weeks in 1942, features achingly lyrical prose, even in depicting the horrors of war.
0 kommentar(er)
