Island of a Thousand Mirrors in Ultimate Popsugar Reading Challenge

Oct 15, 2019 Nadine in NY Jones rated it it was amazing

Shelves: 100-best-of-21st-c, literary-schmiterary, fiction, audio, based-on-real-life

Farther out beyond the reef, where the coral gives way to the true deep, at a certain time of day a tribe of flat silver fish gather in the thousands. To be there is to be surrounded by living shards of light. At a secret signal, all is chaos, a thousand mirrors shattering ...

This is harrowing and gut-wrenching and beautifully written. I look forward to what she writes next.

I listened to the audiobook, which was excellent, but I wish there were two different readers for the two POVs. The ch ...more

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Dec 21, 2014 Booktart rated it it was amazing

I've been reading a lot of fiction lately and have been hoping for one of those novels that would stay with me, that I would become completely engrossed in. I finally found it! The exploration of the character who becomes involved with the Tamil Tigers was a bit weaker than that of the other characters, but overall I loved this. The writing is beautiful and the story, while tragic, heartbreaking, and at times tough to read, is an important one as the civil war in Sri Lanka went on for years but ...more

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Jul 13, 2014 Megan rated it it was amazing

Shelves: international-reads, goodreads-firstreads-giveaways, asia, american-stories, contemporary, feminist-themes

My Mom won a copy of this book via FirstReads and loaned it to me soon after she finished it -- this review is based on that copy. Set against the backdrop of the Sri Lankan Civil War, the book is divided into two sections. In the first, the story is narrated by Yasodhara (who comes from a Sinhala family) and tells her family's story in the period leading up to the outbreak of the war and the family's departure from their home country to the United States to escape the violence. Part two is narr ...more

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