Just after the wave, a book review
When everything is lost, you can still start again. Start living, again.
This book is a masterpiece.
It is a chisel artwork.
First considering the story: singular, if I have to find one adjective.
Second, lexis: Sandrine Collette is a real words juggler related to:
- sea
- water
- despair
- sense of void and sadness
- sense of surviving
- joy of living
- action description, as if you are watching a movie
- vividness.
- ability to describe an extreme situation wearing the shoes of children’s mind, too.
You can just turn the page. You cannot stop reading. And when it is ended up. You are steering at the two last words in a state of astonishment.
Awesome. Amazing. Surprising.
Thanks to Sandrine, then.
There is a family on a hill completely surrounded by the ocean, after a tsunami. Nine children, mother and father. They must find a way out in that imponderable and repetitive immensity of that vastness of water, facing the ocean becoming a monster.
They are humans against the fierceness of nature.
Then the extreme decision, setting up the fate of three of the nine children. The outcasts and abandoned ones.
An escape searching for life with the promise of coming back.
The setting of the story is split on two stages.
The first one is on a boat — that one you made with paper — carrying the fugitive part of the family
The second one focused is on the life on Mars: meaning the life of three children on the top a that hill facing fear, tiredness, despair, famine, eagerness of life.
A stunning happy ending
A metaphor of life: because when everything is lost, you can still start again. Start living, again.
Just after the wave, Sandrine Collette: applause and standing ovation!!!
