Burnt Shadows - my thoughts.

I'm not sure if my personal connection to the events in this book are clouding my judgement, but I really do think this may have been one of the best books I have ever read. I'm quite sceptical to literature as being a former A-level Lit student I've become prone to critiquing writers and their techniques, but I've found if I don't immediately click with the book, then there is no chance I will fall in love with it.

 I've always felt the need to contextually read up on the book, the author, the events etc beforehand, but with Burnt Shadows this just wasn't the case. Shamsie's writing does this for you. The broad canvas on which the backdrop the novel is propelled against, paralleled to the intimate scenes between the characters and the two families, Ashraf-Tinoko and Weiss-Burton prove for deeply contrasting scenes that you wouldn't expect to work, but they do. Death is inevitable for this book. It's everywhere, unavoidable, embedded deep in the core. For some reason or the other, despite my great attachment to the characters their deaths just didn't seem to affect me. I suppose this is become of the constant reinforcement that life is not rigid, you are not constrained to a box, but instead there is an air of fluidity that dominates the characters as Shamsie ebbs and flows from different countries, to different time periods, stressing the idea that home is not a place, rather an idea, a comfort.

I felt the initial periods, Nagasaki and the period overulling the end of the British Raj the most compelling. There was just an untouchable beauty to the way Shamsie narrated these time periods. I suppose it was the idea of youth that too captured me the most, the air of recklessness in both Hiroko and Sajjad enchanted me and momentarily let me escape from the deep foreboding cloud of destruction that loomed above.

Whilst the latter part of the novel, Afghanistan and New York, still remained compelling I felt as if the intimacy of the characters loosened and rightly so as so much loss had occurred it just didn't feel quite the same.

My one disappointment for this book has got to be the ending. There just wasn't much of one to speak about, and I felt that after all the devastation, the  heartache, the love, the affection, the characters deserved a better ending, especially Hiroko.

Throughout all this, it remains Shamsie's writing style that encapsulated me in this bubble of a world she had created, if you read this book read it not for the historical context it brings, but for the language, for the language will not disappoint. I promise.