The Great Reclamation

Incredibly well developed characters and settings! Dragged a little for me in the middle but I'm also not a historical fiction girlie. Overall enjoyable and solid book reflecting on power and community and colonization

Singapore has a fascinating evolution, and this book feels like a teaser for that complicated history from colonisation to land reclamation to capitalist utopia and surveillance state. The book is set across the mid of the last century and follows a young boy who grows up in a fishing village, dabbles with left-leaning student unions, and then becomes a government worker involved with the land reclamation projects. At first look you think this is a nostalgic story about what you leave behind when you destroy your past, but thankfully the book is more complicated than that. Transformations are always good and bad. And childhood dreams and childhood loves are not always meant to become reality.

I enjoyed this, and yet I always wanted the book to give me more historic and political details.