Book Recommendation: How We Disappeared by Jing-Jing Lee

Book Recommendation:

How We Disappeared by Jing-Jing Lee

What it's about:
A beautiful, stunningly ambitious novel set in Singapore about a woman who survived the Japanese occupation and a man who thought he had lost everything. For fans of Min Jin Lee's Pachinko and Georgia Hunter’s We Were the Lucky Ones.

Singapore, 1942. As Japanese troops sweep down Malaysia and into Singapore, a village is ransacked, leaving only two survivors and one tiny child.

In a neighboring village, seventeen-year-old Wang Di is bundled into the back of a troop carrier and shipped off to a Japanese military brothel where she is forced into sexual slavery. After sixty years of silence, what she saw and experienced there still haunts her present.

In the year 2000, twelve-year-old Kevin is determined to find out the truth – wherever it might lead – after his grandmother makes a surprising confession on her deathbed, one she never meant Kevin to hear, setting in motion a chain of events he could never have foreseen.

Weaving together two timelines and two very big secrets, this stunning debut opens a window on a little-known period of history, revealing the strength and bravery shown by numerous women in the face of terrible cruelty. A profoundly moving novel, it is based partly on the author's great-grandfather’s experiences. (goodreads)

Thank you @TLCbooktours for my copy! Check out the #HowWeDisappeared blog tour and instagram tour to read more about the book!

About Jing-Jing Lee: Born and raised in Singapore, Jing-Jing graduated from Oxford’s Creative Writing Master’s in 2011 and has since seen her poetry and short stories published in various journals and anthologies. Jing-Jing's novella, If I Could Tell You, was published by Marshall Cavendish in 2013 and her debut poetry collection, And Other Rivers, was published by Math Paper Press in 2015.

Comments

Book Review: The Turn of the Key by Ruth Ware

Ruth Ware always delivers when it comes to interesting and layered characters. The Turn of the Key is a thrilling account of Rowan Caine's experience as a live-in nanny in a luxurious smart home unlike anything she has ever seen. This mystery is the epitome of the saying "if it's too good to be true, it probably is" because even though moving into the home of the Elincourts is an upgrade from her tiny apartment and dead-end job, it comes at a steep price. Every chapter, there is something suspicious that kept me wondering if anyone in this suspenseful book was telling the truth. Which, is obvious in the first page because Rowan is writing a letter to a lawyer, from jail, because she's being held for murder. Who is Rowan? Did she come into the Elincourt's lives for a reason? She should have known something was wrong on the day she interviewed, when one of the children warned her to never come back. With a house full of surveillance cameras and parents who ar

Historical Fiction Recommendations

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Jennifer 📚 (@thats_what_she_read) on Jul 12, 2019 at 4:01pm PDT Raise your hand if you’re in the mood for a great #historicalfiction ! ⁣ randomhouse #partner ⁣ } ⁣ The last HF I read was # Montauk by Nicola Harrison. It was a nice vacation! ⁣ ⁣ Here are the next two that are on my list: ⁣ TIME AFTER TIME By Lisa Grunwald (out now)⁣ A magical love story, inspired by the legend of a woman who vanished from Grand Central Terminal, sweeps readers from the 1920s to World War II and beyond. ⁣ On a clear December morning in 1937, at the famous gold clock in Grand Central Terminal, Joe Reynolds, a hardworking railroad man from Queens, meets a vibrant young woman who seems mysteriously out of place. Nora Lansing is a Manhattan socialite whose flapper clothing, pearl earrings, and talk of the Roaring Twenties don’t seem to match the bleak mood of Depression-era New York

Book Review: Summer of '69 by Elin Hilderbrand

One of my most favorite book of the summer so far! Buy it here! When Elin comes out with a new book, it's a must. Like a don't-even-read-the-synopsis no-brainer. Just as she delivered a multi-dimensional page turner with The Perfect Summer, Summer of '69 is just as much a treat- but with historical fiction at its core, which is a genre Elin hasn't presented before. The story lines of several members of the Foley/Levin families intertwine as their lives during the summer of 1969 unfurl (or in some cases, unravel). There's 13-year-old Jessie, her mother Kate, and Kate's other three children, Tiger, a soldier serving in Vietnam, Kirby- a flower child with a rebellious streak and a past she's trying to run from, and Blair, who is about to give birth to twins and just made the biggest mistake of her life. At the top of the family tree is the matriarch, grandmother Exalta, who floats through the rooms of the family's sprawling Nantucket

That's What She Read

Search This Blog