Scattered all over the earth

A book with a great idea and a terrible execution

This book was love at first sight. A beautiful cover, a really interesting synopsis, an amazing subject: language. How could I not love it? But this proved that even if a book has an excellent idea, if it’s not written well, it won’t work. It will fall down like a sand castle on the shore.

Was exactly like I imagined the book: a castle with great potential characters, in a dystopian world where some countries disappeared or changed because the climatic changes, and people needed to immigrate.

This world became so small, we could go anywhere, the immigration allowed the mixing of cultures and languages, creating something new and exotic.

The main character, Hiruko, is really interesting, her country (Japan) disappeared, she is the only speaker of her mother language and tries to find another person also from her country to exchange. In the meantime that she immigrated to Denmark, she created her own language, a mix of English with something different but really interesting. On the other side are Knut, a linguist student interested in lost and ancient languages. What a match!

In this search for another person that can speak Japanese they meet other people, and here starts the problem and my sand castle falls down. Some chapters are narrated by these people and all looked the same to me. The narrative was so flat, they had kind of the same personality, sometimes I even forgot which character was narrating the chapter because they had nothing interesting on them, no emotions, nothing unique that could make them different.

The secondary characters had everything to be interesting, but their construction was too superficial. Maybe if the author concentrated on just keeping Hiruko and Knuts narrative views, these could be a little bit better.

Also the relationship between people was weird. How can we call someone that we know for some minutes immediately a friend and even travel to another country for a person that we just know?

Besides the two main characters, the connection between the others didn’t make sense to me. It was too abrupt, putting a group of strangers together and now they are best friends. Maybe if the emotions were better explored, that could be a little bit more convincing.

But of course, some things were also positive, like the idea of how languages can shape who we are and be a very important (or even most important) part of ourselves, because it’s through the language that we define the world around us.

As an immigrant I understand the Hiruko necessity to reconnect with her language, because sometimes when you are living in a foreign country it’s really relieving to find someone that speaks the same language as you and have a conversation that can come more from your heart.

I also liked the mix of cultures and the effects of the immigrants that was explored in the book, making me think that maybe in the next 400 years it could be exactly like that: the world became our garden, and some cultures just blend in themselves.

Besides all the points, it looks like a rushed book that needs more time and more work to be better polished to fix the lost narrative. This is the first book of a trilogy that I am not interested in reading.