{"id":47,"date":"2005-12-01T20:34:11","date_gmt":"2005-12-02T00:34:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lettersandsodas.com\/books-test\/?p=47"},"modified":"2005-12-01T20:34:11","modified_gmt":"2005-12-02T00:34:11","slug":"swimming-in-the-monsoon-sea-by-shyam-selvaduraitundra-books-2005","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/swimming-in-the-monsoon-sea-by-shyam-selvaduraitundra-books-2005\/","title":{"rendered":"Swimming in the Monsoon Sea by Shyam SelvaduraiTundra Books, 2005"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>At first, this book seemed too slow, too flat, but after a few chapters, I was entranced. Selvadurai&#8217;s descriptions of Sri Lanka, its streets and architecture and its climate, its trees and birds and foods, are precise and vivid, and then there&#8217;s also the sense of history, both personal history and the colonial legacy of the place. The characters, true to adolescent life, aren&#8217;t always likeable: but there&#8217;s depth in their prickliness, and they&#8217;re appealingly perceptive, figuring things out as they go along, learning acceptance and how, as the epigraph from <em>Giovanni&#8217;s Room<\/em> by James Baldwin puts it, &#8220;to say Yes to life.&#8221;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>At first, this book seemed too slow, too flat, but after a few chapters, I was entranced. Selvadurai&#8217;s descriptions of Sri Lanka, its streets and architecture and its climate, its trees and birds and foods, are precise and vivid, and then there&#8217;s also the sense of history, both personal history and the colonial legacy of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-47","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-young-adultchildrens"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=47"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=47"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=47"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=47"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}