6/12/2023 0 Comments Island of a thousand mirrors![]() Their best friend Shiva lives with his family in the upper floors of the girls’ home in the capital city of Colombo. ![]() ![]() Older sister Yasodhara, who narrates much of the story, is the bookworm Lanka, (“La”) is the beauty. The deeper love story, however, is between the sisters, Yasodhara and Lanka Rajasinghe, so distinct from each other yet so intertwined, much like the Buddhist Sinhala and Hindu Tamil people of Sri Lanka. It’s a triangle with Shakespearean overtones: The Romeo is Tamil and the Juliets - sisters - are Sinhala, representing the two ethnic groups sharing, then fighting over the island nation. As with last year’s “We Need New Names,” NoViolet Bulawayo’s astonishing debut about a girl leaving a violent Zimbabwe for a new life in Detroit, the devastation in “Island of a Thousand Mirrors” gets delivered in a captivating story tempered with sensuality and moments of grace.įirst, the love story. In her debut novel - already a prizewinner abroad - Oakland writer Nayomi Munaweera uses the child’s point of view to devastating effect in describing life during the seemingly endless civil war in her native Sri Lanka. With their direct gaze, lack of nostalgia, and overwhelming instinct for surviving the impossible, they may be our last hope for making sense of the senseless or explaining the unexplainable. ![]() ![]() Perhaps the only way left to attempt to understand war - and love - is through children. ![]()
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