The Mountains Sing, Nguyen Phan Que Mai
There are few books I’ve read that have been as painful or as heartbreaking as The Mountains Sing (another was Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi). The Mountains Sing follows three generations of women as they struggle to survive through wars and famines in twentieth-century Vietnam. Told from the granddaughter Huong’s perspective, she observes all the things that her grandmother does to ensure their survival, and learns about the many times her grandmother has had to reinvent herself because of situations out of her control. Because the US education system is so lacking in any kind of history besides its own, I felt dropped into a context I did not know much about, but that only made it more interesting. Huong’s every day worries, like having friends at school or a boy she likes, are juxtaposed with the fact that she hasn’t seen her mother or father or uncles since the war started more than 7 years ago, and is waiting for them to come home. When they finally do start to trickle home from all corners of the country, Nguyen’s narrative deals with how a broken family, and a broken country, can once again begin to mend itself.
The Inland Sea, Madeleine Watts
Blending the history of Australia, the modern day terrors of climate change, and one woman’s struggle to be an “adult” for the first time, The Inland Sea is as captivating as it is frightful. Watts has a refreshing kind of prose: she talks about the past while also acknowledging colonialism and all the harm it has done, she talks about the present and the extreme weather Australia is seeing every year, and she talks about the future through the eyes of her protagonist, who is constantly trying to plan for it while also holding herself together and battling her own harmful behaviors that hinder her time and again. The reader never does get to see the protagonist’s future come to fruition, much like how the Earth’s future is also a big question mark that no matter how hard we try to ignore, is always present. However, the one thing left when the book ends is hope—at the very least, hope for the protagonist’s future, if not for the Earth’s.