![Amazon prime logo](https://cdn.statically.io/img/m.media-amazon.com/images/G/01/marketing/prime/new_prime_logo_RGB_blue._CB426090081_.png)
Enjoy fast, free delivery, exclusive deals, and award-winning movies & TV shows with Prime
Try Prime
and start saving today with fast, free delivery
Amazon Prime includes:
Fast, FREE Delivery is available to Prime members. To join, select "Try Amazon Prime and start saving today with Fast, FREE Delivery" below the Add to Cart button.
Amazon Prime members enjoy:- Cardmembers earn 5% Back at Amazon.com with a Prime Credit Card.
- Unlimited Free Two-Day Delivery
- Streaming of thousands of movies and TV shows with limited ads on Prime Video.
- A Kindle book to borrow for free each month - with no due dates
- Listen to over 2 million songs and hundreds of playlists
- Unlimited photo storage with anywhere access
Important: Your credit card will NOT be charged when you start your free trial or if you cancel during the trial period. If you're happy with Amazon Prime, do nothing. At the end of the free trial, your membership will automatically upgrade to a monthly membership.
Buy new:
-44% $14.99$14.99
Ships from: Amazon.com Sold by: Amazon.com
Save with Used - Good
$12.50$12.50
Ships from: Amazon Sold by: BEJO TRADE
Learn more
1.27 mi | ASHBURN 20147
![Kindle app logo image](https://cdn.statically.io/img/m.media-amazon.com/images/G/01/kindle/app/kindle-app-logo._CB668847749_.png)
Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required.
Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.
Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.
The Storm We Made: A Novel Hardcover – January 2, 2024
Purchase options and add-ons
In this “espionage-laden family epic” (Vanity Fair), an ordinary housewife becomes an unlikely spy—and her dark secrets will test even the most unbreakable ties.
Malaya, 1945. Cecily Alcantara’s family is in terrible danger: her fifteen-year-old son, Abel, has disappeared, and her youngest daughter, Jasmin, is confined in a basement to prevent being pressed into service at the comfort stations. Her eldest daughter Jujube, who works at a tea house frequented by drunk Japanese soldiers, becomes angrier by the day.
Cecily knows two things: that this is all her fault; and that her family must never learn the truth.
A decade prior, Cecily had been desperate to be more than a housewife to a low-level bureaucrat in British-colonized Malaya. A chance meeting with the charismatic General Fujiwara lured her into a life of espionage, pursuing dreams of an “Asia for Asians.” Ten years later as the war reaches its apex, her actions have caught up with her. Now her family is on the brink of destruction—and she will do anything to save them.
Told from the perspectives of four unforgettable characters, The Storm We Made spans years of pain, triumph, and perseverance. “The tenderness in its details, the ordinary ways that these characters love and laugh in the face of the extraordinary…Chan shows us, with clarity and care, how the truest mirror comes from the intimacy of human connection” (The New York Times Book Review).
- Print length352 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherS&S/ Marysue Rucci Books
- Publication dateJanuary 2, 2024
- Dimensions6 x 1.4 x 9 inches
- ISBN-101668015145
- ISBN-13978-1668015148
The Amazon Book Review
Book recommendations, author interviews, editors' picks, and more. Read it now.
Frequently bought together
![The Storm We Made: A Novel](https://cdn.statically.io/img/images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/812uPZH4WYL._AC_UL116_SR116,116_.jpg)
Products related to this item
Get to know this book
Popular highlight
Jujube wondered about the ways in which girls and women performed for men by always knowing what it was men wanted and how it was they wished to be comforted, always engaged in the ongoing calculus of figuring out what sides of themselves they should show to a man and which parts of their grief were too unbearable for him.130 Kindle readers highlighted thisPopular highlight
The Japanese occupiers killed more people in three years than the British colonizers had in fifty.124 Kindle readers highlighted thisPopular highlight
Yet perhaps this was what a woman’s idealism is: not the reach for a utopia—everyone had lived long enough to know perfection was beyond reach—but the need to transform one thing into something better.111 Kindle readers highlighted thisPopular highlight
Though all love was humiliation, in a way, Cecily supposed. All love was someone breaking their soul into smaller pieces and offering the broken pieces of themselves as a puzzle to someone else—help me put myself back together.95 Kindle readers highlighted thisPopular highlight
But no matter how hard they scrubbed at their skin to get to the lighter layers, no matter how well they formed their vowels around the English language, no matter how loudly they said their surname, no matter how hard they tried to be the right kind of civilized, they remained, in the eyes of their white imperialists—less than.94 Kindle readers highlighted this
From the Publisher
![Storm We Made](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/S/aplus-media-library-service-media/6cd1318d-4efe-488f-8688-cc06c7d0b8ac.__CR0,0,970,300_PT0_SX970_V1___.png)
|
|
|
---|---|---|
|
|
|
|
|
|
---|---|---|
|
|
|
![](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/S/aplus-media-library-service-media/54edc3a0-3233-425a-987e-164eb3b8ec6f.__CR0,0,970,300_PT0_SX970_V1___.png)
Editorial Reviews
Review
“Readers are transported back to 1945 Malaya in this rich, spellbinding saga that follows Cecily Alcantara, a mother who was also an unlikely spy for Japanese forces during WWII. Ten years prior, a chance meeting with General Fuijwara lured her into a life of espionage. Now, she’ll do anything to save her family. This captivating story shines a light on the dangers of war and the lengths to which we’ll go to save the ones we cherish." —Women's World Magazine
"Vanessa Chan is the kind of author who can completely transport you to another time and place… it is a total page turner.” —Good Morning America, GMA Book Club Pick
“This ambitious and sweeping debut novel explores the fallout of a Malayan woman’s decision to become a spy for Japanese forces in World War II, unwittingly helping to usher in a brutal occupation with devastating costs for her family.” —New York Times Book Review, Editors' Choice
“’Ambitious’ would be a trite term for Vanessa Chan’s outstanding debut, a historical novel that thrums with the commingling tensions of its backdrop: the lead-up to the WWII Japanese invasion of what is now Malaysia. Chan writes her characters—particularly the conflicted protagonist, Cecily Alcantara, a former espionage asset to the Japanese Imperial Army—with a precision that neither flinches from the brutality of war nor ignores the humanity within. This is a book with real staying power.” —Elle Magazine
“[T]his debut novel grabs the reader by the throat and never lets go, following a single family through one of World War II’s most grisly—and often overlooked—chapters... Moving between perspectives and timelines—between actions and their disastrous, unforeseen consequences—Chan tests the bounds of familial bonds, political sacrifice, and human resilience.” —Oprah Daily, The Best Novels to Read This January
“A wartime story like you’ve never read before.” —PEOPLE Magazine
"[A] searing debut.... Conquest and colonization have long been fertile subjects in fiction, from Joseph Conrad to present-day writers such as Zadie Smith and Imbolo Mbue. Like them, Chan uses colonialism as a lens through which to examine such themes as racism, colorism, status, poverty and violence.... The author and her relatives carry 'the legacy of colonization' in their bodies, Chan writes, and it was this intergenerational trauma — and resilience — she wanted to evoke through [her novel]. With authenticity and passion, Chan succeeds in imparting their pain and will to survive, through singular characters whose flaws and contradictions are as fascinating as their strengths."
—Leigh Haber, Washington Post
"This ambitious and sweeping debut novel explores the fallout of a Malayan woman’s decision to become a spy for Japanese forces during World War II. Seduced by promises of an “Asia for Asians,” she instead helps usher in a brutal occupation with devastating costs for her family.“ —The New York Times
“Vanessa Chan’s espionage-laden family epic, which takes place in Malaya under British and Japanese occupation, dissects the moral complexity of decisions made under duress.” —Vanity Fair
"The Storm We Made is a searing look at the impacts of colonialism, the horrors of war, and the power of a mother's love.” —Town & Country, "The 30 Must-Read Books of Winter 2024"
"The Storm We Made kicks up a weather system of epic proportions, ranging from military terror during World War II to domestic warmth…. The book’s greatest power: It makes space for complexity without relinquishing the grip of a good story…. Chan reveals how war is experienced in bodies and hearts, breaking down the morale of those who remain.… This is a novel concerned with power — how it’s given and taken, whom we must align with to get close to it — and the consuming desire for more…. But simmering beneath all of this is the will to dream — for the self, the family and the nation.… What makes the book pulse with life is … the tenderness in its details, the ordinary ways that these characters love and laugh in the face of the extraordinary…. Chan shows us, with clarity and care, how the truest mirror comes from the intimacy of human connection.” —The New York Times Book Review
"January may find you dry, blue and still vacuuming pine needles from the carpet. A favorite way to inject excitement into that postholiday apathy? Espionage. Vanessa Chan’s historical fiction debut, set in the 1930s and ’40s, centers on a Malayan mother of three. Seduced by the promise of an Asia for Asians, she sees that promise break during the Japanese occupation.” —The Morning newsletter, The New York Times
“World War II might be the most popular subject for historical fiction, but Vanessa Chan's debut, The Storm We Made, defies the typical focus on the Western front and a clear-cut distinction between good and evil that characterizes many books… [a] heartbreaking story of a family riven by war.” —Jenny Shank, Minneapolis Star Tribune
“The intrigue begins from page one of Malaysian author Vanessa Chan’s much-heralded debut novel. This historical family saga tells the story of a Malayan mother caught up in espionage during World War II through varying points of view, handled expertly by Chan.” —Hannah Bae, San Francisco Chronicle, Datebook "19 New Books to Cozy Up With This Winter"
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Bintang, Kuala Lumpur
February 1945
Japanese-occupied Malaya
Teenage boys had begun to disappear.
The first boy Cecily heard of was one of the Chin brothers, the middle of five hulking boys with narrow foreheads and broad shoulders—they were Boon Hock, Boon Lam, Boon Khong, Boon Hee, and Boon Wai, but their mother called them all Ah Boon, and it was up to the boys to know which one she was calling for. Throughout British rule, the Chin boys were known for being rich and cruel. It was common to see them crowding in a circle behind the Chins’ gaudy brown-and-gold house. They’d be standing over a servant, one of the boys with a switch in his hand and all the boys with glints of excitement in their eyes as the switch made contact with the servant’s skin. When the Japanese arrived before Christmas 1941, the boys were defiant: they glared at the patrolling Kenpeitai soldiers, spat at the ones who chose to approach. It was the middle boy, Boon Khong, who disappeared, just vanished one day as though he had never existed. Just like that, the five Chin brothers were four.
Cecily’s neighbors wondered what had happened to the boy. Mrs. Tan speculated that he had just run away. Puan Azreen, always a cloud of gloom, worried that the boy had gotten into a fight and was lying in a drain somewhere, which made the neighbors peek fearfully into drains as they went about their errands, unsure what they would find. Other mothers shook their head; that’s what happens to bullies, they said, maybe someone had simply had enough. Cecily watched the Chin boys’ mother, curious to see if Mrs. Chin was stationed by the door waiting for news, or if she performed the hysterics of the terrified mother, but Mrs. Chin and the rest of the Chin family kept to themselves. On the rare occasion they left their house, the four boys surrounded their gray-faced parents in an enormous wall of sinew and muscle, keeping them out of sight.
Only once did Cecily encounter Mrs. Chin, very early in the morning at the sundry shop. Mrs. Chin was staring at a bag of squid snacks, face glistening with tears. Cecily marveled at the quietness of it all, no sobs, no shaking, just bright, damp cheeks and wet eyes.
“She’s been like that for five minutes now,” said Aunty Mui, the shop owner’s wife, delighting in being able to share her discovery with someone else.
After a few weeks, because there were no further public displays of anguish, no other gossip to be gleaned, people stopped wondering about the Chin boys. Soon the neighbors even forgot which Chin brother was missing.
The next few disappearances came in quick succession. The thin boy who worked as a sweeper at the graveyard, who Cecily was convinced stole the flowers that families left on gravestones and sold them at the market. The plump boy behind the sundry shop who smudged his face with dirt and pretended to be lame by tying up the bottom of his pants leg, to beg passersby for coins. The ghoul-eyed boy who had been caught trying to peep into the toilets at the girls’ school. Bad boys, Cecily and her neighbors murmured. Maybe they got what they deserved.
But by the middle of the year, sons of people whom Cecily knew also began to disappear. The nephew of the couple who lived in the house next to Cecily, a boy with an enviable baritone who won all the oratory contests at school. The son of the town’s doctor, a quiet boy who carried a small chessboard with him everywhere and would set it up to play with anyone who asked. The laundry lady’s boy, a diligent teenager who laundered all the Japanese soldiers’ uniforms, and whose mother was now forced to take over because the Japanese did not have the time for bereavements.
With only one major road bisecting the town, one chemist, one sundry shop, one school for boys and one for girls, Bintang was a town small enough for worry to mutate. The whispers began again, pointed glances at the families of the missing boys, lowered voices wondering about their fate. In fact, the boys’ disappearances were discreet, as though they had sneaked away, afraid to offend. This bothered Cecily because teenage boys made the most noise when they moved—they bumped into things, they stomped when they walked, they shifted uncomfortably even when standing still, unable to control the new power in their physique, the new length in their limbs.
“Is it not enough that they starve us and beat us and take away our schools and our lives? Must they come for our children too?” hissed old Uncle Chong, who owned Chong Sin Kee’s sundry shop, the local store in the middle of Bintang where everyone bought supplies, from spices and herbs to rice to raw soap. His wife, Aunty Mui, slapped his mouth. Those were treasonous words, and the Chongs had a son too.
It had not always been this way. When the Japanese first arrived three-ish years before, Cecily, her husband, and their three children had been one of the families to line up outside their house and wave at the military convoy, a welcome party. Cecily remembered the blossoming in her chest as she pointed out the bald, squat Japanese general, Shigeru Fujiwara, at the front of the parade. “That’s the Tiger of Malaya!” she told her children.
General Fujiwara had brought the British forces to their knees in under seven weeks, orchestrating a brilliant and unexpected land invasion, cycling in on bicycles from the north where Malaya bordered Thailand, across rough, hot jungle terrain, while the British Navy, anticipating a sea attack, pointed their guns and cannons south and east toward Singapore and the South China Sea. To Cecily, it had felt like a dawn of a new age. But her hope for a better colonizer was short-lived. Within months of the Japanese arrival, schools began to shut down and soldiers made their presence felt on the streets. The Japanese occupiers killed more people in three years than the British colonizers had in fifty. The brutality shocked the quiet population of Malaya, accustomed by then to the stiff upper lip and bored disinterest of the British, who mostly stayed away from the locals as long as the tin-mining and rubber-tapping quotas were reached.
Fearful of what was to come, Cecily started doing a roll call every evening to make sure each of her three children had made it home. “Jujube,” she would call over the din of dinner preparations. “Jasmin! Abel!”
And every evening they answered—Jujube irritably, face twisted in the seriousness of an eldest child, Jasmin cheerily, small feet skittering across the ground like a puppy’s. And her middle boy, Abel, who worried her the most, who would shout, “Ma, of course I’m here!” careening toward her with a big, loping hug.
For a while the system seemed to work. Evening after evening as the sun set and the mosquitoes began their nightly chorus, she called for her children, and they replied. The family would gather at the scratched dining table and tell each other about their day, and for a few minutes, listening to Jasmin snort-laughing at one of Abel’s theatrical jokes, watching as Jujube pulled at her short curls that looked so like Cecily’s own, Cecily could forget the severity of their circumstances, the terror of the war, the barrenness of their lives.
But then, on his fifteenth birthday, on the fifteenth of February, Abel—who had light brown hair so unlike the rest of the siblings, Abel who was ravenous all the time because of the food rationing, Abel who had grown six inches the previous year and was now taller than everyone in the family—had not answered her call, had not made it home from the store. And as the waxy birthday candle melted into Abel’s dry birthday cake, Cecily knew. Bad things happened to bad people; and she was exactly that—a bad person.
The truth was, for the last couple of years, Cecily found she could not hide the distinct fear that controlled her existence; the knowledge that all the things she had done would come for her, that retribution was always a day away. This fear manifested in her anxious, twisting fingers, in the way her eyes darted over her children, in the distrust with which she greeted anyone unfamiliar. Now that the catastrophe had come to pass, she felt every piece of taut energy in her body simply give way. Jujube told her later that she had released one long howl, low and anguished, then sunk into the rattan chair without further sound, her expression calm, her body motionless.
Around her, the family was a hive of activity. Her husband, Gordon, paced, shouting to himself or perhaps to her, at the top of his lungs: “Maybe he went to the shop; maybe he got stuck at a police checkpoint; maybe, maybe, maybe.” Jasmin held on to her older sister’s thumb, her face too stoic for seven years old. Jujube, ever practical, had sprung into action. She extricated herself from Jasmin and ran to the back of the house, called over the fence to the neighbors on both sides: “Have you seen my brother? Can you help me find my brother?” But it was past the eight o’clock curfew, and none of the neighbors dared respond, even if their heart broke at the sound of Jujube’s cries.
Cecily said nothing. For a few minutes before the guilt took hold of her, it was a relief to see her terror realized. It had finally come to pass, and this was all her fault.
She had caused this, all of it.
The morning after Abel’s disappearance, Cecily’s neighbors swung into action. The Alcantaras were a respectable family, and respectable families did not deserve tragedies this monumental. The men organized daytime search parties, carrying signs and roaming around hollering Abel’s name. They looked in storerooms behind houses, they looked in the corners of Abel’s favorite shops, they looked in playgrounds and in abandoned factories. They looked but didn’t enter the old school that had been turned into a Japanese interrogation center. The men stayed in small groups, bent their heads low when the Kenpeitai soldiers in muddy-green uniforms looked their way, but felt a secret smugness because there was safety in numbers, and this search for the boy felt like their own tiny revolution, a small uprising against the Japanese. The women treated the incident like a birth or a death, bringing over an endless supply of food and consolations to the Alcantara house. They assured Cecily that all would be well—that Abel was just a careless boy and had probably fallen asleep somewhere and would find his way home soon, that Abel had lost track of time and was staying with one of his friends, that boys like Abel—so handsome, so charming, and with so much promise—didn’t just disappear.
Cecily, the other women thought, was surprisingly ungrateful. She did not say thank you when they delivered the food, she did not make them tea when they waited at the door to be invited in, she did not cry or confide or collapse in the way that would be understandable. All she did was look so terribly alert, eyes darting everywhere, as though ready to pounce. On what? They didn’t know. Of course, they felt for her, they whispered to one another, but Cecily really took things too far sometimes. Remember the terrible stories she used to tell her children?
“The one about the man who was forced to drink soapy water till his stomach hung out from his body, then the Japanese soldiers balanced a wooden beam on him and jumped on either side of the beam like a seesaw till he burst? That one?” said Mrs. Chua.
“Aiya, do you really need to repeat that awful story? Yes, that one!” said Mrs. Tan. “It gave my children nightmares for weeks!”
Sometimes, they thought, Cecily really didn’t know how to act right. They were all mothers; they knew how mothers should act. And when a mother loses a son, she should cry, she should collapse, she should seek comfort in other mothers. She should not just hold her pain as a shield, act so prickly that everyone was afraid to come near.
Still, they reminded themselves, they needed to be good neighbors. Mrs. Tan continued to send steaming bowls of soupy noodles to the Alcantara house and tried not to be offended when she saw the bowls standing in the exact place outside the gate when she passed by the next day. Mrs. Chua offered to watch Jujube and Jasmin so Cecily could get a break. Puan Azreen, who loved the dramatic, told stories about everyone she’d ever heard, who’d gone missing, but she couldn’t resist adding a sheen of horror to her tales—people coming home absent limbs or with disfigured faces.
To the neighbors, at least Gordon, Cecily’s husband, seemed grateful enough. He tramped through town with the other men, called for his son, slapped the backs of other husbands, thanked everyone for their time. He has become so much nicer now, the neighbors told one another. Of course you don’t want such a thing to happen to anyone, of course not, they tsk-tsked, but they preferred this iteration of Gordon Alcantara, taken down a peg, without the pompousness they had disliked about him in the before times, when the British were in charge and Gordon was an administrator who fancied himself better than all of them.
The days of Abel’s absence stretched into weeks. Daily searches by the men became sporadic, and the house visits from the women began to dwindle. As more and more boys began to disappear, the neighbors stayed home, hid their own sons away from the barbed glares of the Kenpeitai soldiers. The brief joy of revolt died down, and the neighbors remembered once again that during a war, the only priority was one’s own family. They could not waste their time on the missing children of others.
A week before he disappeared, Abel had come home with an armful of ugly, weedy-looking flowers that he’d clearly plucked off the side of the road. But he had been so proud, that Cecily had put them in a vase and pretended they were the most beautiful flowers she had ever seen. In the weeks after he disappeared, the weeds became dry and brittle, but still, Cecily couldn’t bring herself to throw them out. Then, one afternoon, she forgot to close her bedroom window during a thunderstorm, one of the noisy, wall-rattling tropical storms that Malaya was known for. The room became misty with rain, and the wind knocked everything over, shattering the vase of Abel’s dried weeds. That evening after the storm subsided, Gordon found Cecily bleeding from her fingers as she tried to glue the pieces of the vase back together, tried to arrange the broken weeds to stand as tall as a boy. But, as with the pieces she had set in motion ten years before, there was no fixing to be done. There was no coming back from this.
Product details
- Publisher : S&S/ Marysue Rucci Books (January 2, 2024)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 352 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1668015145
- ISBN-13 : 978-1668015148
- Item Weight : 1.2 pounds
- Dimensions : 6 x 1.4 x 9 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #70,324 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1,120 in 20th Century Historical Fiction (Books)
- #2,641 in Women's Domestic Life Fiction
- #5,815 in Literary Fiction (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
![Vanessa Chan](https://cdn.statically.io/img/m.media-amazon.com/images/S/amzn-author-media-prod/9tceik4d0pb7184va54tkia197._SY600_.jpg)
Vanessa Chan is the Malaysian author of The Storm We Made, a national bestseller, a Good Morning America book club selection and BBC Radio 2 book club pick. The novel, her first, will be published in over twenty languages worldwide. Her other writing has been published in Vogue, Esquire, Electric Lit, and more.
Related products with free delivery on eligible orders
Customer reviews
Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.
To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.
Learn more how customers reviews work on AmazonCustomers say
Customers find the book well-written and thought-provoking. They also say the characters are very real and thought provoking. However, opinions are mixed on readability, with some finding it fascinating and others finding it heartbreaking.
AI-generated from the text of customer reviews
Customers find the book well written, gripping, vivid, and moving.
"...The prose itself has some beautiful sentences. The book is well written. Well researched...." Read more
"...Vanessa Chan does write well and learning about the Malaysian experience of WWII and both the British and then Japanese occupation was very..." Read more
"...I appreciate how the author wrote exceptionally well by using different POV’s of this mother and her children to better understand their lives, as..." Read more
"This is a generally well written book on a subject I did not know much about, so it was interesting and informative...." Read more
Customers find the characters in the book real and thought-provoking.
"Vanessa Chan has given us a masterpiece. Deep, complex characters inhabit a Malaysia (Malaya) of recent past, with their lives and culture and..." Read more
"...a bit stilted, but the plot, subplots, metaphors, and characters are remarkably written...." Read more
"...The characters are very real and thought provoking. The story is difficult to read and will make you sad...." Read more
Customers are mixed about the readability of the book. Some find it fascinating, powerful, informative, and good, while others say it's heartbreaking, difficult to read, and resembles a cheap TV drama.
"...put this one down, as the people within are real, flawed, and worthy of our attention. Bravo, Ms. Chan. And thank you." Read more
"...The book is well written. Well researched. But overall, this is a heartbreaking read that I cannot get out of my head or my heart...." Read more
"...and then Japanese occupation was very interesting but I found it just too sad, particularly Abel and Yuki’s stories." Read more
"...put the book down once I started reading, and there were so many good themes throughout the entire book that made you want to keep reading at 2am so..." Read more
Reviews with images
![Heart wrenching but beautifully told](https://cdn.statically.io/img/images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/G/01/x-locale/common/transparent-pixel._V192234675_.gif)
-
Top reviews
Top reviews from the United States
There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.
Top reviews from other countries
![](https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/S/amazon-avatars-global/default._CR0,0,1024,1024_SX48_.png)
![](https://images-eu.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/S/amazon-avatars-global/default._CR0,0,1024,1024_SX48_.png)
The story is told through the eyes of Cecily Alcantara and her three children, Jujube, Abel and Jasmin. Cecily’s husband is an employee of the British administration which operates principally to extract rubber for the Empire. Chan sketches out a snobbish and grasping colonial presence. What follows is much worse. The Japanese promise of “Asia for the Asians” turns out to be anything but. However, the liberation (or the return of the British) in 1945 however proves empty to the Alcantara family.
The book begins in 1945 but we go back and forth in time. Cecily in 1935 is dulled and frustrated, she “wants something bigger than herself, to be a woman who was more than just an extension of her house and family”. The opportunity she takes has catastrophic consequences, for which she is tortured by guilt, a key theme of the novel. The author does not allow Cecily an easy way out. Chan shows well how the dutiful housewife rises, falls and burns. Cecily’s remorse extends to her eldest daughter Jujube who wonders “what they’d done to deserve everything their family had to live through”. It is a challenging read right to the end.
Vanessa Chan gives each of her four main characters a distinctive voice. Jasmin the youngest is a heartbreaking creation. The author writes wonderfully and has devised a plot that is compelling. It is an emotional read, at times painfully so.
![](https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/S/amazon-avatars-global/c696cc25-1d2f-4096-9a62-f141050d3689._CR0,0,500,500_SX48_.jpg)
As British rule collapses, chaos becomes rampant. The book becomes increasingly raw and graphic. Chan is very expressive, overly so at times. Physical descriptions of greasy hair, rank sweat, snot dangling from noses, and beyond filthy rooms mix with the storylines of the children; especially brutal is the imprisonment and sexual exploitation of Abel; all this is laid out for the reader page after page.
Don’t get me wrong, this novel is masterfully written, and her characters are well-defined and unforgettable. Still, there is time to read certain books, so my caveat is if you are feeling less than 100% physically, mentally, or even spiritually, wait to read The Storm We Made until you feel stronger. There were passages where my stomach churned; I wanted to put it down, but I kept reading. This time in history needs to be written about,just be sure you are ready for what unfolds.
![](https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/S/amazon-avatars-global/default._CR0,0,1024,1024_SX48_.png)
I can’t say I enjoyed it, but I’m glad I read it.
![](https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/S/amazon-avatars-global/default._CR0,0,1024,1024_SX48_.png)