Customer Reviews

Beside a Burning Sea

5 star:		(26)
4 star:		(16)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(8)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

Beside a Burning Sea is a wonderful love story woven through extraordinary circumstances -- truly almost like traveling back in time. This book takes the reader to the South Pacific during the height of WWII, just as his last novel, Beneath a Marble Sky, took readers on a magical journey of India. Shors has a way of creating compelling stories for today against a backdrop of some pretty concrete moments in history. His books bring an entire period to life, not just characters. I absolutely recommend this one!

The book opens with a bang, literally, as a torpedo slams into an American hospital ship. A small, mixed bag of survivors swim ashore -- a Japanese POW, 3 nurses, the Captain, and several sailors. One of them is the traitor responsible for the sinking.

I wanted to like this book, but two aspects of the story were incredibly distracting. First, the book contains a number of cultural anachronisms and historical inaccuracies. A few can be swatted away, but after a while they were just too many to ignore. Some might think this is too picky, but consider that the first question in the reader's guide is "How does this book contribute to your understanding of the history of World War II?" Second, the scope and pace of the story -- which is set within the span of a couple of weeks -- was too much, too soon. It just wasn't believeable. Emotions were rushed -- grieving for the loss of shipmates, falling in love with the enemy, repairing a marriage. It was just all too pat.

If you're looking for a romance novel, this is an interesting twist on the subject. If you're looking for historically accurate literature, keep moving.

Mr. Shors organizes his beautiful yet suspenseful story into 18 chapter-days, each introduced by a haiku set out on paper with a peaceful floral background. He illustrates how profoundly lives can change when people must work together in a completely new, different, and insecure environment. Again and again his characters exhibit their true character in the cauldron of adversity and stress.

Two hospital ship nurses find themselves shipwrecked on a tropical island with an array of survivors. All but one are people of hope and good will. It is fascinating to watch one nurse overcome her fears and find love in an unusual place while the other finds a new beginning with her husband, the ship's captain, another of the survivors. We also see a wonderful relationship develop between a young South Seas boy, a stowaway in search of his father, and a strong midwestern farmer-turned-mechanic who finds he has a father's heart for the young boy. The traitor in their midst is evil to the point of being depraved, and threatens everyone's lives. The book has many heroes, however, including a sensitive and brave Japanese soldier who must overcome his past failures and issues of loyalty to country versus friends.

In addition to telling a wonderful story, Mr. Shors explores the effects of war on participants and bystanders, cross-cultural relationships, overcoming of fears, loyalty, and bravery. He uses his knowledge of the Far East to good advantage, and leaves readers with a strong feeling of having "been there" due to his expert word pictures. Through triumph and tragedy, the characters struggle for meaning and for survival. These are 18 days of amazing growth and change everyone.

Beside a Burning Sea was a beautifully told story of love, loss and hope. After reading Beneath a Marble Sky, I had great expectations for Shors' next work and was not disappointed. He builds his characters masterfully and manages to write in a way that entwines sensativity, fear, hope and sadness all at the same time, keeping you captivated to the last page. The perspetive he gives from soldiers on both sides of WWII is powerful and I loved the haiku. It had me thinking of my own as I read along.
I look forward to his next work!

Beside a Burning Sea is an experience. I can still feel my toes in the sand, the sun scorching my skin, the cloying humidity, bug bites ... John Shors develops the scenes so beautifully you'll slip into them and partake. From the moment I picked up this wonderful book I was amongst the survivors of the sunken Benevolence, a WWII hospital ship. You'll experience a joyful swim with dolphins, first love, Haiku lessons, and much more. There is an undercurrent of anxiety as the survivors search for a hiding place from the inevitable arrival of the Japanese forces and a dawning knowledge that there is a traitor amongst them. If you're looking for an escape, this is the place to go.

I'm now very much looking forward to reading Mr. Shors' first book, Beneath a Marble Sky, and his new book due in 2009, In the Footsteps of Dragons. John Shors is an author at the top of my list!

When I ordered this book, I thought I would enjoy it. I'm a "boomer", and both my parents were in the military during WWII (my mother a WAC nurse). And I did enjoy it, although it took me a while to get through. I guess what I want to say is, it wasn't compelling enough for me to sit down and read cover to cover.

That said, I enjoyed the story and always remembered what I'd read before I stopped. The setting was interesting and the author brought those character to life as well as the setting on that island and the times we lived in then.

The love story was touching. I gave it 4 stars, maybe because I figured out whodoneit too easily for my taste.

But still, well done. No great, but good.

Marilyn D'Andrea

You know how some reviewers like to use that phrase, "xx is a master storyteller"? I am going to use that here, but with good reason. John Shors truly is a master storyteller, first with Beneath a Marble Sky and now with Beside a Burning Sea. He manages to tell complex stories about interesting, engaging characters -- all against the backdrop of exotic locales like the Taj Mahal and the South Pacific.

In this WW2-era story, a varied group is torpedoed at sea by the Japanese, and a select few make it to a remote island. The stories of these people and how they have each survived through war is what drives the narrative, and it's very satisfying.

It's 1942, and the hospital ship Benevolence along with its crew including nurses, doctors, and patients is in the South Pacific, ready to lend its services to the wounded after battle. Suddenly, without warning, it is struck by a torpedo and out of over 500 on board only nine survive to swim to an island less than a mile away.

The survivors, Captain Joshua and his wife Isabelle and her sister, Annie (both nurses), another nurse, three crewmen (two officers and one not), an 11-year-old Fijian stowaway, and lastly Akira, a wounded Japanese prisoner who the sisters were caring for when the torpedo hit (and likely saves their lives) all try to make do on the island, search the shoreline for bounty that floats in from the ship, finding food on the island and surviving as best they can.

Joshua knows right away that someone had to have betrayed them to the enemy. And, it is shortly figured out that they had more than crew members, doctors, nurses, and patients aboard, to have been the subject of an attack, there must have been a secret stash of some sort.

It soon becomes clear to the reader that the betrayer is one of the survivors; long before the other survivors themselves are clued in.

But this isn't just a story of survival and betrayal. There is a beautiful love story between the Haiku-writing Japanese prisoner and nurse Annie. Although she has a boyfriend, it is clear that she wants more from a relationship than he has given her. The quiet, intelligent Akira soon becomes that person. Their story is the highlight of this wonderful story. I'll wager a bet that there would be more than one reader (myself) trying my hand at Haiku before the end of the book.

Things don't all go well for the survivors, lending itself to a climactic final scene between good and evil on the island.

Shors is quite a wonderful writer. The story is a little bit too predictable and fact that they were able to amazingly find everything they need for survival makes it a bit far-fetched, but still a better-than-average read. I liked it well enough to search for his previous work, Beneath a Marble Sky. I'd recommend this to readers who long for both a book with great characterization and excitement and adventure. Those who like to read about other cultures and times and places should also enjoy this novel. Not to mention fans of Haiku. I'll be looking forward to his next effort which, we're told in the Readers Guide at the end of the book will be set in modern-day Saigon, involving a variety of characters from around the world. An author as knowledgeable and well-traveled as Shors is should be able to pull it off with finesse.

John Shors' BESIDE A BURNING SEA chronicles eighteen days in the lives of nine people who survive the sinking of the American hospital ship BENEVOLENCE in the Pacific during World War II.

Captain Joshua Collins, four of the ship's company, and a stowaway Fijian boy escape the bombed and broken ship, swimming for the closest island. Josh fears his Naval nurse wife sank under the waves, but discovers her on the beach, exhausted but unhurt. Isabelle Collins and her sister and fellow R.N., Annie, gained the shore with the help of an injured Japanese prisoner of war, Akira. The survivors' landing point of white beach, protected harbor, good fishing, bananas, and coconuts has not yet become a military base for either warring side. But that could change on a dime, especially since one of the nine is a traitor sending covert radio messages to an approaching Japanese convoy.

Shors' aim in BESIDE A BURNING SEA is not so much to tell a story of betrayal and violence, although both invade relentlessly. Instead, he sets up a kind of social experiment, an isolated microcosm where love's permutations can metamorphose. The Collins' married love gets a chance to regain strength and a future. The boy, Ratu, who misses his own father terribly, touchingly bonds with crewman Jake. And Annie and Akira cross the lines of race and wartime enmity. Akira, who is haunted by one little Chinese girl's torture and death he did not prevent, is a sensitive and educated soul who teaches Annie about haiku. Annie is drawn to him as she never could be to her stolid Ted at home. The novel's open sentimentality as it considers love elicits emotion from the reader but in a rather scripted way.

One is almost always aware that BESIDE A BURNING SEA is the imagining of a storyteller; authenticity is sacrificed to a fabricated situation. Whether the characters are appealing or repulsive -- and they are one or the other, with little or no gray margin -- they seldom break out of a reflexive "once upon a time" superficiality. The author injects biographical background on the nine survivors, but, arguably not enough. And the moral certitude of BESIDE A BURNING SEA lends it a reassuring sensibility on a basic level, but also leaves it open to a charge of being simplistically written. Sometimes this novel seems more for the young than for adults.

Furthermore, this castaway tale reveals the identity of the traitor early, eliminating potential suspense. But Shors does build creative tension in his plot at strategic times to spur on the reader.

Overall, Shors' second novel (his first was BENEATH A MARBLE SKY) should satisfy readers who desire a historical novel steeped in emotion and fundamental character types and motivations and who don't mind lightness on details and realism. Lovely haiku epigraphs for each chapter enhance reading enjoyment, and one can see why, originally, the book was entitled THE POET MAKERS. This review's title line began with one of the book's poems, and here is another to conclude:

"I will give up my life
So my second heart endures.
Spring survives winter."

3.5 stars.

I read this and then sent it to my mom because it was such a beautiful story. I am not a writer or an editor so me saying it was well written isn't going to make much of an impact. However, as a reader, it kept my attention and I loved it. I didn't know much about that era, as my mother wasn't even born yet. But reading this story made feel like I was in it. I guess I have an active imagination. To combine so many elements and still have a lovely "will they or wont they" love story. I don't want to spoil it with details. But I will just say that I was very pleased.