Book Review: My Last Continent by Midge Raymond

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My Synopsis 

Imagine This: You are a natural scientist. Specializing in the conservation of birds in Antarctica. Penguins.

You love the Continent so much that every time you're departing you feel like you're leaving a great deal of yourself behind. But you'll come again. You're sure of it. Even though these days, your willingness to return, may be because of a little added incentive. A man. A good man. A kind man. Who loves you back. With whom your relationship begins and ends every time you depart. A cozy arrangement in a place so cold, warmth, company, body heat is very essential. 

But this year, your love affair would face its biggest trial ever. When the continent attacks. After all the harm done to it by tourists, by cruise ships. In Titanic proportions.

Deb and Keller's impending disaster summed for your delight. 

My Review. 

I loved, loved this book!

Frankly, honestly, I only decided to read this book because I found it was set 'at the bottom of the world'. You don't get to read books like this all the time. So I snapped it up. Thinking, I really hope this author is going to make Antarctica like a third main character in this book. Except I hadn't expected to enjoy it so much! Everything I asked for was here in this book:

Amazing storyline with lots of info about penguins, and the planet (made like a main character!). I love highly informative fiction about different animal specie. And this book never lacked info. Well-researched. You will learn so much—★

Great writing. I didn't expect the writing to be that seamless and easy to read and enjoy, and still possessed a literary quality.—★★


Two main characters. DEB, was amazing. I loved reading from her point of view. A woman scientist made a loner because of her job. It's always nice to read titles about women with fascinating careers. Keller, was also quite the charmer. Except by the end, I found myself seething because of decisions he made. Stunning romance between the pair. And I said these days, I hate romance... pah!—★★★

Other characters were amazing as well. None lacking in development. Thom, Deb's research partner. Glenn, the cruise coordinator who's really a pain in the arse. Richard and Kate, a married couple on the cruise who are having more fights—there's a note that most marriages brought to the Antarctica never return the same.—★★★★


First, I found this book a lazy read. Something to sit back, relax and enjoy. But then it dawned on me that something disastrous was about to happen. And I could no longer read it like I would a lazy afternoon read. I was on the edge of my seat. Panting. And when it was all over, I was so down. A heartbreaking tale I would recommend to anyone who wants a tear-jerker. And more.—★★★★★

My rating: 5 stars.

Book View+ INT. Giveaway: A Fifty-year Silence by Miranda Richmond Mouillot

                                                                         

              

I reviewed Miranda Richmond's amazing A Fifty-Year Silence. Read this post as I ask questions concerning characters, scenes and everything the book. You should also enter the giveaway below to stand a chance of winning a paperback copy to sun-bathe with this summer.


I wonder what part your parents played in the story, could you say a little about this?

I have an unconventional family. My mother and father divorced when I was a small child and both remarried, and I have always considered myself as having four parents – all of whom I watched pursuing their own unusual careers and passions as I grew up. With this book, I guess I’d say they were supportive from afar: they taught me to read and research and follow my dreams from a young age, and then they sat back and let me do it. Many people have asked me about my mother, Anna and Armand’s daughter, and what role she played in the story. She helped me puzzle out as much as she could, but one of the reasons I ended up writing A Fifty-Year Silence was my curiosity about the fog of mystery in which she had grown up. She never even knew what year her parents had married!

How did your research into your family’s past affect your family life? Did your husband help in the process, or did he leave you to undergo this personal journey alone?

It certainly coloured every aspect of my life. My husband was very supportive throughout the process. He was a real rock to me in caring for my grandfather. But this was very much my story, and he is totally respectful of my creative process. I never show him my work, which he leaves me alone to do in the privacy of the office he built for me beneath our house.

Your grandmother’s strength (taking yoga to her old age) was inspiring to me. What do you think readers would love most about her which would have an impact on their lives (or at least in their old age)?

Well, if I had to impart just one lesson my grandmother taught me (and it’s hard to pick!) I would choose, “You just have to talk to people.” I learned from my grandmother that reaching out to others, asking them questions, offering them your friendship – it can change the course of your life, and theirs, in ways you could never even imagine. My grandmother’s ability to do that gave her a network of lifelong friends who loved her, and love, in the end, is all that matters. Love, hard work on something you’re passionate about, and plenty of garlic.

If your grandmother were to be alive what would she have loved and what would she dislike about the world now?

The same things she always loved – compassion and creativity (and coffee); and the same things she always disliked – cruelty and injustice. She was very open to change, loved to follow current events, and always had an opinion to offer about everything. I think she’d be delighted by the advance of marriage equality across Europe, and very concerned about the political shift to the extreme right.

Are you writing again? I’m eager to find out what you are working on next?

I certainly am! I am working on a book about brilliance, femininity, and why it’s so unseemly for an intellectual to pursue true love. I am also translating The Kites, the last and greatest novel of one of France’s most beloved 20^th century writers, Romain Gary.

To Purchase A Fifty-Year Silence, click here.

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Here's a review of Miranda Richmond's amazing debut.

Book Review: A Fifty-Year Silence by Miranda Richmond

A young woman moves across an ocean to uncover the truth about her grandparents' mysterious estrangement and pieces together the extraordinary story of their wartime experiences

In 1948, after surviving World War II by escaping Nazi-occupied France for refugee camps in Switzerland, the author's grandparents, Anna and Armand, bought an old stone house in a remote, picturesque village in the South of France. Five years later, Anna packed her bags and walked out on Armand, taking the typewriter and their children. Aside from one brief encounter, the two never saw or spoke to each other again, never remarried, and never revealed what had divided them forever.

A Fifty-Year Silence is the deeply involving account of Miranda Richmond Mouillot's journey to find out what happened between her grandmother, a physician, and her grandfather, an interpreter at the Nuremberg Trials, who refused to utter his wife's name aloud after she left him.  To discover the roots of their embittered and entrenched silence, Miranda abandons her plans for the future and moves to their stone house, now a crumbling ruin; immerses herself in letters, archival materials, and secondary sources; and teases stories out of her reticent, and declining, grandparents.  As she reconstructs how Anna and Armand braved overwhelming odds and how the knowledge her grandfather acquired at Nuremberg destroyed their relationship, Miranda wrestles with the legacy of trauma, the burden of history, and the complexities of memory.  She also finds herself learning how not only to survive but to thrive – making a home in the village and falling in love.

With warmth, humor, and rich, evocative details that bring her grandparents' outsize characters and their daily struggles vividly to life, A Fifty-Year Silence is a heartbreaking, uplifting love story spanning two continents and three generations. 

PURCHASE| GOODREADS

 MY REVIEW

Guys, this is my first stab at non-fiction. And I am so, so surprised I ‘loved, loved’ it that much, I’d be urging you all to go buy it. I mean, I would have been urging you all to go buy it already (as if you had a choice!), but I didn’t think I’d love it that much. So my review:

First of all, I loved the whole reason that motivated this story. Love, War and a place to call home during times where displacement to avoid death was as much as an in-thing as property-scouting in LA (in case you end up becoming a reality TV star). A granddaughter investigating the reason her grandparents split up for fifty years and never spoke to each other! Never spoke of their love with each other, never spoke of the reasons of their separation. A well-lettered couple who always put down records of their lives in a journal during the times of the Holocaust, but then, there’s a huge gap about how they met, how they fell in love, why the woman packed up all her possessions including the children and just left. I figure stuff like this are what non-fiction books are made of. Very intriguing and brow-knitting material. A star to the storyline.── ★

I loved the whole presentation of this work. A story in which the end is already known to the reader (though not your cheesy romantic comedy!), a start that’s very hard to decipher, and an even more confusing, puzzling middle. The whole ending is they split up without seeing or speaking to each other for fifty years. But, was it a happy marriage or one filled with terrible memories? Did they marry out of love or forced together by circumstances of the war (a ‘you only live once’ moment)? Where did their love story all start from? And where did it all end at? Most importantly, what did the middle of this love story entail? Miranda Richmond presents a story that has huge gaps from start to finish. Her duty to connect the dots rifling through old journals of her grandparents, asking her reticent grandparents questions about this separation, looking through old Holocaust records to put their stories together when the parties involved were not being cooperative enough. More discovery leads nowhere or anywhere, a research so involving our researcher finds herself being accused by friends and family of having her purpose in life mistaken. ── ★★

There’s enough suspense to keep you glued to this book. With a grandmother whose evasiveness would sometimes get you clenching your teeth in annoyance or happy to be learning a lot about these moments that shook the world, a grandfather who flies into rage anytime word of his ex-wife is mentioned, and their (love) story which holds much prominence in history, how could you not be glued to your seat? I read it all in two days, twitching nervously in my seat for hours on end.── ★★★

The two main characters: the grandparents, were lovely. They had so much personality it was such an amazing experience reading about the adventures(?) of two well-lettered jews during such dark times in history. You would love Anna, the grandmother, who was carefree in her days before the war, whose views on things such as life, wisdom, are enlightening as well as inspiring, whose evasiveness gives her actions a whole mysterious nature. You would also adore, Armand, who is so much uptight and particular about how things should be done (it’s not a wonder his wife left him), who is so reserved and a total snub to anyone who has high-spirits as his ex-wife, who naturally pushes anyone aside as a weird way of loving them. Their jobs in medicine and linguistics in a time of war is also informative. A star to the main objects of Miranda’s research.── ★★★★

Other characters also make this book a masterpiece. Miranda, herself, whose quest to find out what truly happened with her grandparents which no one in her family had ever bothered themselves with, whose undying curiosity gives this book the depth it has, whose selflessness at the expense of her living is put to much questioning by family and friends. Julien, the man who gave our lead character all her restless soul really needed: a home of her own (with a family that has suffered much displacement). Erna, a grandaunt who played an important part in her grandparent’s (love) story.  A star to these characters.── ★★★★★

My rating is obviously a five out of five stars (5/5 stars).

Miranda Richmond’s A Fifty-Year Silence is one of those moving, inspiring, informative books you must purchase about one girl’s quest to find answers everyone is, um, silent about.

I recommend this book to anyone who loves a good, old, love story set in a treacherous historical background (as the holocaust). Anyone who has had enough of Hitler literature and would want to learn about the ordinary lives of Jewish families and the effect the war had on them. Also any of you, like me, who love sinking into DW TV’s holocaust-styled documentaries, would revere this title so much.

Look out for my interview with Miranda Richmond for a more insightful look into this title.

My work not done here. Off to post my review on Goodreads.