Of the many historical fiction novels I’ve read, I don’t believe I’ve read one set during WWII in Malaya. The Storm We Made by Vanessa Chan piqued my interest with its positive reviews, beautiful cover, along with it being a literary novel based on espionage and how it can tear a normal family apart. Upon completion of the novel, I only came away partly satisfied. I believe this is the author’s debut novel, and so it’s hard to fault her for not meeting some of the requirements that many readers have.

The novel revolves around four central characters of a single family: Cecily, Jujube, Abel, and Jasmin. The main focus is on Cecily, the mother. Right at the start, the novel performs pretty well. It highlights the lives of the family members and how life goes in a tiny town called Bintang. Ruled by the British, the mother and father do what they can to climb the social ladder and are actually able to provide a pretty stable life for their kids. Once Cecily meets a Japanese spy posing as a merchant, all things start to go very wrong from there. After the Japanese invade, things go from bad to absolutely horrible as family members start to disappear, and Cecily begins to regret her decision to help the spy in hopes of forging a better Malaysia for Asians.

But no matter how hard they scrubbed their skin to get to the lighter layers, no matter how well they formed their vowels around the English language, no matter how loudly they said their surname, no matter how hard they tried to be the right kind of civilized, they remained, in the eyes of their white imperialists – less than. – Cecily

I found myself actually enjoying the story overall, but the one thing I had a hard time with is really connecting with the characters on an emotional level. While I was able to transport myself back in time mentally and really try to view things from their point of view, it just wasn’t written in a way that allowed me to connect with them. I always had to keep in mind that things were obviously different back then. While there are many heartbreaking set pieces, the novel also had many acts of love and friendship that made it past the darkness of war, and that alone usually makes these types of historical fiction novels worth reading.