Review: Amber Road by Boyd Anderson

Amber Road by Boyd Anderson

• Historical Fiction
• Published: February 1st 2013
• Carlie read 25 January 2013
• Carlie’s Rating:
• Rate This Book: (1 votes, average: 4.00 out of 5)
  
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140 Character Or Less Book Summary

Gone With the Wind in Singapore WWII

(36 characters) No spoilers follow. But to sum up: I really liked this book.

The Book

1941, colonial Singapore. Victoria Khoo, is 17 and is of Chinese decent but more closely aligns herself with British culture. She has dreamt forever about marrying her British neighbour, Sebastian Boustead, however he comes back from London with a fiancée, Elizabeth Nightingale.

And things soon explode, literally. It’s WW2 and Victoria must survive.

I knew almost next to nothing about Singapore, but this book brings it to life. This book is very similar to Gone With The Wind but with out the long boring exposition about the war. Victoria starts off as a somewhat spoilt “nothing bad will ever happen to me” girl who would step outside in the middle of a raid, to a woman doing whatever it takes to survive a war. OK, she still makes infuriating choices sometimes. At one point she reminisces “I was such a girl back then, now I’m a woman” (paraphrasing there from memory) – then a chapter or two later she’ll make some girl decisions again.

Despite Victoria’s flaws, I really enjoyed reading this book. I read it almost in a day. I wish that her relationship with Elizabeth was built more, but perhaps at the same time it was perfect. I was trying to decide what rating to give this, and I found I was being silly. Why was I thinking four? No, I really enjoyed this, and any fault didn’t really matter to me. I highly recommend this book and I hope it does well for Boyd Anderson, an Australian author that I hadn’t heard of before. Read this book. Let me know what you think.

Captivating
Nothing worth mentioning

Thanks to NetGalley and Random House Australia for the ARC.

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