Customer Reviews

The Sand Crabs

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A simple story about a WWII vet who retires to a private island off of Fiji after a successful business career and unexpectedly runs into a Japanese WWII vet with whom he has unfinished business.

Reckoning ensues.

Overall, a well told story of a guy thinking back on the events that shaped his life.

And then strangely, after the story is complete the author tacks on a unrelated and somewhat misogynistic rant in the "epilog" (women don't belong in the workplace - they used to be on a pedestal, people these days have sex without getting married, America is going to hell in a handbasket, yadda yadda).

Retired businessman Donald Foster settles into his island paradise, believing tranquility is his destiny. But then he recognizes an old enemy -- his Japanese torturer -- and the two of them consummate a tale of hatred and adversity that began half a century earlier. For these two old men, now warriors again, the last battle of World War II would be personal, and fought amid the sand crabs of Vaka Malua. This would make an excellent movie, with William Shatner and George Takei as the two combatants.

Life and circumstance force us all to face enemies. The hallmark of a life well lived is how we deal with those enemies. On the beach at Vaka Malua, a tiny island in the South Pacific, amid romantic sunsets, tropical flowers and the sounds of the rain forest, Donald Foster faces his oldest enemy and ends a life well lived.

Through the eyes of Donald Foster we glimpse a peaceful Polynesian sunset as moving as any symphony which becomes the prologue and the epilogue to a story of love, grief, agony, rage, vengeance and ultimately forgiveness. Within the 192 pages of TheSand Crabs author M E Morris manages to address a subject with such depth that most authors would be hard pressed to contain it in a thousand pages.

The Sand Crabs, by ME Morris is more than a novel. It's a lesson in life and a commentary on our century written by a craftsman.