Where She Was Standing

Rating:
Summary: Moving & powerful!
Review: I can't say enough good things about this book. It's a very powerful look at what might seem like a minor event, the killing of a Canadian in faraway East Timor, and the lives it touches around the world. Maggie Helwig has taken a large number of characters' lives and made them real people.

Maggie Helwig's books of poetry have a well-deserved reputation for being powerful and moving, and that's equally true of her first novel, one that should be of universal appeal especially in this time when the world seems less safe than ever before. Those who have heard about East Timor will want to pick this book up; those who haven't will want to read it to see what can happen when small countries are abandoned for great causes.

Once i started in on this book, i couldn't stop reading until i'd finished it all. (And yes, the ending was worth the sleepless night.)

Rating:
Summary: Lyrical writing, important story, interesting characters
Review: In my opinion this is a novel of unusual freshness and outstading quality.
The novel is about engaged activists and others around them who are trying to bring public opinion, diplomacy, and charity to bear on situations of great distress at home and across the world. They are trying to ease suffering and end torture and murder. The characters are alive and human. They are interesting in their inner and their outer lives.
The novel does not depend on "plot" because it tells several intertwined stories. All of the stories are exciting and important.
I found the writing to be lyrical and sensual and exact.

Rating:
Summary: a powerful and beautiful book
Review: Maggie Helwig's _Where She Was Standing_ centers on Indonesian-occupied East Timor in the early 1990s. There has been a massacre of Timorese demonstrators. Lisa James disappears in the aftermath -- only one of many disappearances, but she's a foreigner, and she may have filmed the demonstration.

The dangerous search for Lisa drives the taut, suspenseful plot; it's also the lens for the book's powerful exploration of how to find balance in our damaged world. What surprised me most when I first read this book is how much it made me love the world we live in. After all, it's a book about terror and atrocities; bad things happen to people, and justice is not often done. To quote from the book, it's a world "where it is so easy to lose people. In some places, they go out in the morning to a demonstration and they never come home, or they are arrested at work or at school. In some places, they walk into the city at night and are gone, not even gone into some mass grave but just gone, maybe alive but absolutely changed. Maybe they are at King's Cross Station saying fantastic things to their shoes. Maybe they have walked into the lens of the security camera and vanished there. One wrong step, and you are no longer part of the world."

All these things are true. And maybe that's why the passionate sense of hope that slowly builds throughout the book had such an impact on me. Yes, it _is_ easy to lose people, but the lost ones persist in a thousand unexpected ways. Lisa's absence links together a network of characters on three continents, and the traces of her that remain bring change to all their lives. Just a few of the people touched by Lisa are Rachel, a human rights researcher in London who puts together the first few clues in Lisa's case; Hasan, an Indonesian teacher who has chosen to throw his lot in with the Timorese resistance and is endangered simply by carrying Lisa's possessions; and Lisa's mother Melissa, who will finally uncover the truth about her daughter's disappearance.

The hope that I found in the book comes not only from the characters' compassion and their struggles with grief and fear; reasons to love this world, despite its damage, are woven through every page of the book. Helwig is a poet as well as a novelist and it shows in the way she chooses small moments from these disparate lives to paint the strange, often-overlooked grace of everyday life.

All in all, I feel like this review is failing to do adequate justice to this unique and powerfully moving book. I loved it, and I recommend it as strongly as I possibly can.