An Ocean of Minutesby Thea Lim
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I didn't "really like" this book as I thought it was very sad. However, it is a very well written book and the characters were so well drawn that their sorrows seemed very real to me as I read it.
This is the first novel of a woman who grew up in Singapore and now lives in Toronto. It is about a woman who falls in love and is faced with a decision about her future because she is given the option to travel forward in time in exchange for saving her beloved. How her choice works out for them is the core of the story which moved back and forth between the time before her choice and the time after. There are also a lot of ideas about memory, and objects, and history, and the passage of time.
"I do not know that this is the last time I will ever leave this house. This is where I became myself. I should have gone from room to room touching everything, seizing as much as my memory could hold: the flip clock on the oven, the accordion door always stuck in its track, the dust motes and how they twinkle when I open the blinds. But I don't know." (p. 250)I am counting this book toward the Canadian Book Challenge.
I agree with your sense of this book. I also felt quite sad reading it, so can't say I loved it. But it was well done.
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