Saving Fish from Drowning

I bought this book in Zion last year at a quirky antiques & books shop, and it's been sitting on my nightstand at my parents' house since. I decided to bring it with me this weekend to a family lake house trip, and I'm glad I did – this is a great book in which to get swept up. The cast of characters has an Agathie Christie feel, a diverse crew of different ethnicities, ages, personalities, and backgrounds that both fulfill and evade common archetypes so as to create interesting group dynamics. The setting is stunning; the book is clearly well-researched and replete with full descriptions of East Asian traditions, religious beliefs, history, and political turmoil – all of which catch the somewhat ignorant American tourists in a terrible situation. I'm not sure I'd qualify this as a thriller, but Tan did an excellent job of building suspense; it was hard to put down, and easy to just keep reading and reading.

The overall message is clear: tourism is not a solution to developing nations' problems, and throwing money at causes is not enough to make demonstrable change. It's hard to tell if the things tourists/distant activists do to help are actually helpful, or more harmful in the long run. It's different when you don't have a real stake in the situation, and especially when you don't understand an incredibly nuanced and brutal history. So long story short: try not to visit anywhere in political turmoil, but if you do, have a VERY good understanding of that turmoil, and the people whose lives you're stepping through.

I wasn't sure I understood the decision to have the book narrated by a ghost, except maybe to play better with the Burmese beliefs in the supernatural, and to lend a more sympathetic light to the rather unsympathetic tourists, who she refers to as her friends. There were a few detours into pieces of history that weren't especially relevant to the main plot, and the main plot wrapped up in a rather strange, too-neat, and unbelievable way. Otherwise, this was a perfectly pleasant book.