West with Giraffes - First Reads Review

 

A pleasing mix of survival, altruism, history, geography, life and earth, all  woven around two towering creatures of God's pure Eden! The American North East is ravaged by a hurricane, the magnitude of which, they say repeated after about a century, in the form of the hurricane Sandy. It is 1938, era of the Great Depression and the second world war clouds looming. And here, the hurricane has added its share and two giraffes from Africa are not spared either. Caught up in the hurricane, while being locked in their crates, the giraffes are now in the harbour in New York.  

A Single Swallow by Zhang Ling

This literary fiction brings in fragments of the life in China, during the second world war until Emperor Hirohito surrenders,  through the eyes of three men. An American medical doctor who goes by the name Pastor Billy; American soldier gunner's mate Ian Ferguson; and Liu Zhaohu, Chinese trainee soldier. The fourth main character is a woman Ah-Yan. She is portrayed as an intelligent girl, who has a yearn to learn. Her peaceful life in village is turned upside down when the Japanese invade China. The horror and violence of the invasion, the devastation of the village, and more specifically how Ah-Yan is robbed of her childhood, her innocence, and all the humiliation she had to face for the atrocities of somebody else. When the author says that a child has to wake up as an adult all of a sudden, and children has no time to grow up in periods of war, it makes a gash in your heart! The wars around the world spread over the time of whole human existence impinges on the childhoods of many.