Helene's Reviews > Things We Lost to the Water: A novel

I look forward to next week's discussion of this book and what others thought. The title is so apt in many ways from leaving Vietnam as boat-people to surviving what is not said but must be Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans.

This is a similar yet very different experience from the Vietnamese family our church sponsored in the late 1970's. The Vuongs were such a close family, they would never have thought of leaving each other to live different lives.

There is much Vietnamese in the book, and being curious, I had to know the translations. Google translation is spotty in it's Vietnamese, in large part because there are so many accents that it is difficult to determine what the actual words are. It makes me wish we had access to the Vietnamese-English we gave the family. There is also on phrase in Haitian Creole which, once I got the meaning, made perfect sense to me: "timoun dyab," ti moun - petit monde; dyab - devil or in this instance, "devil children." It would make perfect sense in Joual and definitely made me laugh. Then there is some Parisian French. No translation required.

The book is well written but tries to encompass so much that there seem to be loose ends everywhere. I may add more after our discussion.