I'm not going to rate this book, because I would rate it poorly, & I don't generally like to do that. But I will try to give a review.

I really struggled to finish this book after reaching the halfway point. It's a very neatly structured book, which is not wrong, but oddly the 4-person structure multiplied with the narrative jumping from present to looking into their past made me a little confused -- what exactly is the book about? Is the book ultimately about the stories of their relationships? The two couples? That's the closest I can assume when I got to the end.

And if that's the case, was placing the setting against the backdrop of the tsunami necessary? I picked the book up with the assumption that the tragedy of the tsunami would figure strongly into the novel, but instead I found that it was just placed as a backdrop and the locals sort of serve as background, nameless, faceless figures. Their relationship problems could have happened anywhere then, it didn't have to disintegrate against this setting. The book didn't even deal with their trauma as well, I felt, or what it meant to have survived a natural tragedy of that scale. But that's not surprising since the tsunami was just treated as a backdrop. And it wasn't just tsunami but the way other things were cursorily thrown into as well, like for example, I am not sure how I feel about the statutory rape bit or why it was necessary.

I felt that the more 'present' situations were more interesting that the bits that flashed back to their past and how the relationships started. I was also really interested with the old woman that found and took care of chee seng but we didn't really even get to see her properly. I felt like perhaps with enough time the story could have really been more moving and delved deeper into the interiority of these characters and treated their stories with more complexity, depth.But as it stands now they seem to just scratch the surface.