I read this because my friend had met the author during her time in the Peace Corps in Africa and didn't know thats who he was until after meeting him. After I finished reading the book, I think she was lucky. I would have been so self-conscious talking to the author knowing what he had been through. How could I understand? What would I say? What could I say? Horrible. Depressing. Children always suffer the most during tragedies; the loss of their innocence is beyond any other horror. And the helplessness I felt while reading...

I liked this book a lot! I had heard so many good things about it that I thought I should read it...but every time I looked at the description of the book, I would decide not to. It just didn't sound like my cup of tea. I was wrong. It was wonderfal. An amazing set of love stories and friendships over time. How things that are lost can be found. That old ways and new ones can come together. And touching on a terrible time in our country's history that is mostly ignored in a beautiful and touching way. Very poignant. I highly recommend it.

This is potentially the worst written book I have ever read. The dialogue was horribly, awfully, ridiculously stilted...no one at all, ever, has spoken like that. And the author clearly missed her 9th grade English teacher's lessons on "show, don't tell." This plot line had potential but literally I cannot imagine how it got published with writing like that. It's impossible
To see past that. Ugh. Plus, the characters were all 2D, with no depth at all. They changed how they felt each other page to page to fit whatever the author felt like...no consistency. And for a tragedy as big as this one, it is unbelievable that the author managed to write it so poorly that I never got emotional at all while reading. Waste. Of. Time.

I just can't figure out this book, which is odd because normally I am a huge fan for the magical realism type of story telling. This one may just be too much. I think the idea was amazing, the fact that the power of a story can save you from the horrors around you. And her exploration of it is intriguing. But I think I always just felt too far away from the characters to really feel for them. It made the whole thing seem like too much of a fairy tale. After reading books like "The Invisible Bridge" that made it hard for me to sleep for weeks, this jut didn't measure up. I didn't feel the terrible pain i knew I should considering what had happened in the book and what the narrator went thought. Objectively I knew it was awful, but the writing kept be so far removed from the reality of it that I just couldn't feel it like I should. I think it was a great concept, but it just seemed too far fetched and contrived...and too focused around the narrator (only she seemed really affected, changed, thrown around, by the "new world" her village created). The writing itself was lyrical, the words were beautiful, and certain phrases really resonated, but on the whole, it was not not quite there for me.