Wave by Sonali Deraniyagala
3 of 5 stars
This book was a rough one. Not because it was badly written because it wasn’t. But just trying to picture what she went through and how horrifying it would be to live through a tsunami and have your husband, parents, and 2 kids ripped away from you by a big wave. How can she survive such grief?
The entire book is a lot of pain. It is hard to realize sometimes that her story is just like others that day. She’s not alone. For those that survived they share a similar story to her. I can’t imagine writing a book like this and giving a voice to my grief for all the world to read and then having to go on a book /media tour and just re-hash it numerous times.
One review on Goodreads states, “She has had enough time to process some of her pain, but in some ways, she still seems a bit confused and numb although she is allowing herself to dive into her memories.” Huh? How can you judge what is the proper amount of time to process the loss of her family?
Again, it was a difficult read for me. Not a lot of positivity, which of course is understandable, but it was hard to keep trudging through it and not have anything happen at the end that was good.
SYNOPSIS FROM GOODREADS
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.
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