Sarong Party Girls by Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan

August 8, 2019 innah961 Comment

★★★

A quick Chick-Lit, written in Singlish, an English-based patois that Singaporeans speak to each other. It was interesting and unique, and given the fact that I haven’t read anything like this before, I genuinely enjoyed the writing. This is my first book from Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan.

Our main heroine in this book is Jazzy, a 27-year-old, born and living in Singapore. In her mind, she is getting old and her time to get married is running out.

But Jazzy doesn’t want to just marry anyone, especially not the Asian boys she keeps seeing in the clubs, or the ones that are so traditional and bring her mum soup in the mornings. She wants to marry an English Man, become rich, move abroad and have his babies.

To achieve this, Jazzy and her friends make a deal to start going into clubs and places and meet their perfect English men. They become Sarong Party Girls, and from chapter to chapter we read about new adventures and troubles that Jazzy gets herself into.

This book is unique in many ways, there are a lot of immoral scenes that teach us moral lessons. There is so much culture in this book and it’s nice to see how people tolerate moral levels differently in another part of the world.

I didn’t like Jazzy, and I didn’t agree with almost anything she was doing. From chapter to chapter she kept making stupid decisions, and even though she learnt a little bit in the end, she was still clueless at so many things, which I find annoying.

As much as I loved the refreshing taste of culture this book gave me, I also didn’t enjoy the main character at all, and am struggling to give it anything more than three stars.

It is an amazing book, with quality writing that I am sure represents Singaporeans well, culture a plenty and many scenes that trigger discussions. But if you are looking for your perfect character, you won’t find this is Jazzy. You won’t find it in Sarong Party Girls.

Thank you to ReadersFirst and Allen & Unwin for sending me a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Purchase Links:
| Amazon UK |Amazon US |

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Postcards

Greetings from Singapore

March 23, 2016October 28, 2020 innah962 Comments

This is my first card from Singapore from postcrossing (SG-202555)

Thank you Kai, for reminding me of my childhood. I really don’t know why everything reminds me of my childhood! The same thing happened with this postcard. It is basically little tiles with words and pictures inside, and I remembered how I learnt the basic words and letters when I was very small. Ah, if only I could be a child again hehe 😀

Postcards

Production of ceramics – Singapore, and how much power a postcard can have

March 8, 2016October 28, 2020 innah96Leave a comment

One of my favorite postcards. Not because it’s from reddit. Or because it’s large. It is from Singapore, from /u/duosharp, but the fact that makes her special is how the artist showed the production of ceramics in a single picture.

Look at this everyday life. Isn’t it amazing? When you drink tea and sit in your comfortable chair at home, next to the fireplace, do you think who made those tea pots and ceramic tools? No, I haven’t though about it, either. But now I did. This postcard had the power to make me see how much effort people put in stuff everyday. Not only to make a tea pot, but to make a lot more stuff, touchable and untouchable, that we don’t even realize.

It made me think that today, I drove my sister to her handball practice, and it doesn’t mean anything, not to me, not to her, but if that didn’t happen, she would have missed practice. If the people didn’t make the tea pot, maybe we wouldn’t have been drinking tea today, eh?

Duosharp, thank you for opening my eyes with a single postcard. Each postcard has such power. We only need to see it 😉