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Alice Nash’s The Sound of Ripples: The Unpredictability of Life

When writers write, they use their vast imagination and their mind’s creativity to bring out a great story of book. They aim to touch the heart of every reader, making their book the hero that changes the life of the one who read it. But not all books can turn into a hero. Only a few good books have stories that inspire, just like The Sound of Ripples by Alice Nash.

The book is strict fiction. However, the background is real. The story starts in the late 1980s, where the Chinese Economic Reform is in full swing. By that time, Hainan has just been formed as a newest province and was granted status as the largest Special Economic Zone by the central government. It has offered the fantastic job possibilities that nowhere else in China can compare favorably with, Hainan attracts many young and ambitious graduates to pursue their dreams of a better life, including the twenty-seven-year-old Samantha Liao, the novel protagonist.

Samantha is a quite successful girl who is laid back by nature yet unsatisfied with her personal life with a university degree in literature and administration management. She takes two weeks holiday in Haikou, the tropical coastal capital of Hainan province, and becomes a journalist at the Haikou Evening Newspaper before her holiday is over. Just when everything seems to be going smoothly, her life is overtaken by a series of twists, both emotional and professional.

The story speaks a deep sense of how unpredictable life can be, and how the major event(s) in life are being made up by irrelevant and insignificant coincidences. Nothing goes according to wish or plan dejectedly, even she is forbearing and conciliatory could not save her from falling into predicament, yet mysteriously turns out to be better than she could have possibly imagined but comes with even greater challenges along the way. The story shows how unexpectedly fast one thing changes to another that life is not always guaranteed to be happy or prosperous, while one has no choice could be the best choice to be duty-bound move forward without the sentimental hesitation otherwise it’s always follows her, whatever the future hold. 

Alice Nash intelligently portrayed through the story of how life unfolds to the protagonist, making it a very relatable to the readers. The twist of the story is heart-pinching and did managed to reach the deepest core of the readers’ heart.

There is no wonder why Alice Nash was able to write such a remarkable story. Being a simple girl from Sichuan, deep in the South/West China, where the green hills and clear water brought her up to be a nature admirer, she tends to urbanely look at the changeable world differently from distance, where with the time and space in the between, it has flawlessly percolated the direct impact of the noise of the vivid kaleidoscope of emerging, or sinking, or drifting along somewhere in between. She is kind of person who faces a complicated world with a silence of criticizing sight, but without pretendence. That is why The Sound of Ripples is not just a storybook but a book of life-lessons that readers can easily related to themselves. 

Many true-to-life learning from this book make you feel that the author seems to understand and know you well. It is as if she is telling your story most creatively. What makes it even more significant is that the story from the mind of an author whose creativity is awe-inspiring. So, if you are looking for a book that is worthy of your precious time (and of your money), then you will never go wrong with this one: The Sound of Ripples. A great book, indeed.

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