Ratings12
Average rating4.3
On the morning of December 26, 2004, on the southern coast of Sri Lanka, Sonali Deraniyagala lost her parents, her husband, and her two young sons in the tsunami she miraculously survived. In this brave and searingly frank memoir, she describes those first horrifying moments and her long journey since. She has written an engrossing, unsentimental, beautifully poised account: as she struggles through the first months following the tragedy, furiously clenched against a reality that she cannot face and cannot deny; and then, over the ensuing years, as she emerges reluctantly, slowly allowing her memory to take her back through the rich and joyous life she's mourning, from her family's home in London, to the birth of her children, to the year she met her English husband at Cambridge, to her childhood in Colombo; all the while learning the difficult balance between the almost unbearable reminders of her loss and the need to keep her family, somehow, still alive within her.--Publisher description.
Reviews with the most likes.
As other readers have pointed out, the author of this book comes across as pretty selfish and entitled at times and it's sometimes hard to figure out what she's getting to and that sometimes makes for a jarring reading experience. That being said, I think it might just be the way se expresses herself more than her actually being those things. I have no idea how I would react to such a large amount of tragedy and it's her story so it's not my place to say what's the right or wrong way to tell it so I'm not going to rate this one.
Heart-wrenching book but quite interesting in the details the author provided about the tsunami and the lives of her children and husband.
I expected more information on “the event” - the tsunami that took her family. I was curious why I wasn't getting more emotional about the story – I generally cry at the drop of a hat, and certainly about children dying – and then last night, about 1/3rd of the way through, I did cry. But overall it resonated with me less than I thought it would, and I'm not sure why.