Roger Pulvers

Star Sand is a pleasant though somewhat simplistic read. I think it is more for Young Readers. On the positive side, it looks at an issue not often covered in books about WWI--deserters and those who, for one reason or another, help them at a personal cost. I would have appreciated more character development and more tension in the story. It seemed a bit too trivial in places and the ending wrapped it all up in a neat little bow. It took me several weeks to read the book because I couldn't get pulled into the story. I would read a couple pages, walk away from it, come back and finish a chapter.… (más)

some readers have commented abt how this short novel kept them up, and I am among them - others have complained that the shift in narrative perspective in the last 1/3 of the story irritated or disappointed them.

For me it was more puzzling than irritating, but it did feel trivializing in a way / but maybe that's part of the puzzle?

that we can most easily idealize the heroism of war by trivializing the trials of the prosaic contemporary? that in contrast to the commonplace can we best idealize the past ?

i would like to read a review or two by someone who had read this in the original Japanese edition - I'd like also to know if the author did his own translation to the English ? therein I think lays some of the rub of this, of the feeling that the three thirds don't make up a satisfying whole ?



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Star Sand I was intrigued by the premise and it was a pleasant story but I expected something a little more.
It wasn't really all that gripping. It was a little too convenient too. Everything worked together more like a modern fairy tale, a happy dream that these things could even begin to happen, even the end of the main situation isn't exactly happy. It's more strange and beautiful than believable.
For someone who loves a fairy tale, which is inherently not believable, it was a nice little book for a day when you want to read something a little light and not so serious. I did have some issues with certain lines that were a little off for our female protagonist, they were a little sexist, like an annoying bit about being accustomed to lying by virtue of being a sixteen year old girl and some assumptions about tears. Do girls do these things? Yeah, some do, and so do boys (more the lying because it's socially unacceptable for them to cry but they have manipulative equivalents), but part of it is the way that piece was written. Like all girls are like that and it's a girl thing. Like it's natural and obvious. It annoyed me but it wasn't a common theme throughout the story, so I chose to forgive it, but it was the kind of moment that made my skin crawl at the idea that any man actually thinks we all think like that. I hate it when that happens and it was  this sort of thing that drove me nuts in some of the Dangerous Women stories.
The book begins with the contents of the diary, which has some holes in the story of it all. It had made me not quite want to finish, but there was enough left to the story that I decided to carry on. They do get mostly resolved and the holes in the story of the diary are put there on purpose, and spur on the third part of the story. Still, it was all convenient, even when it was tragic. None of this stopped it from being a nice story to read but it all kept it from being something as gripping as All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr, which was the level of work that I had been hoping for.
Still, it was nice to read something a bit more hopeful and something short and easy on a weekend like this past one. I had done a lot more reading than I thought I would because I hadn't anticipated choosing such short books.… (más)