I always enjoy things about Burma and this was lovely--beautifully written. My only objection is I apparently missed the point. I got to the last page and was kind of left bereft. Why did I go on this trip? It was a pretty trip to be sure, but I feel like I got left standing at the end of the lane with nowhere to go.

I really enjoyed reading Miss Burma.

The subject matter is difficult, the scars left by British colonialism familiar and yet still horrible and tragic, in particular the simmering ethnic resentments and hatred that has overwhelmed the country after independence. There are two things though that distinguish this novel from books that tread similar ground. First, and as previously mentioned, Charmaine Craig has decided to take a fictional approach to her family’s past. Her decision to ignore the memoir or biography makes for a more intimate reading experience. Yes I did wonder what it must have been like writing graphic scenes of her grandparents having sex or exploring their feelings of betrayal as they both find comfort in the bed of others, but the freedom to explore the fictional thoughts of her grandparents and mother means that they have a complexity and depth that might have been missing if she’d taken the non-fiction route. The second thing is that Louisa Craig – Miss Burma – while she might be the title character is not the novel’s primary focus. We only really see the world from her point of view until the last quarter of the novel. Craig therefore, and astutely, avoids making the book about the Miss Burma contest or the melodrama of her marrying a commander of the Karen National Liberation Army, and rather focuses on the troubled history of Burma told through the turbulent relationship between Khin and Benny. Their love, their hatred, their inability to be together or be apart.

My full review can be found here: http://mondyboy.com/?p=8417

It's been a long time since I read a book about which I feel so completely ambivalent as I do about Miss Burma. It is based on the lives of Charmaine Craig's mother and grandmother, and opens with a prologue detailing the success of Louisa Bension (Craig's mother) as a contestant in the Miss Burma pageant. The fact that she wins it, as the daughter of a Jewish man and a Karen (pronounced Kar-EN) minority woman, is held up by General Aung San as proof that the new independent Burmese regime, no longer under British rule after WWII, offers opportunities to members of all ethnic groups. Most of the rest of the book, however, is told in flashback; we go right back to the beginning of the marriage between Louisa's parents, Khin and Benny, and follow them through Burma's long civil war/genocide against the Karen people. Their marriage waxes and wanes; imprisonment, torture, and abandonment leave their mark on the relationship, which eventually deteriorates into mutual infidelities, mistrust, and coolness, even as Khin and Benny build a business empire together.

Like several other books on the Women's Prize longlist (When I Hit You and, in some ways, Sight), Miss Burma makes more sense to me as creative non-fiction than as a novel. Craig is constrained by the events that actually occurred, and the work that she puts into characterising Khin and Benny early on comes to nothing when she skips several years in a single sentence and then presents us with characters who appear to have changed almost beyond recognition during that skipped time. It's not that this doesn't happen to traumatised people; it's that if you want readers to believe your fiction, you need to show them some level of consistency. Biography and memoir, perversely, don't require nearly as much verisimilitude: those genres, unlike fiction, do not need the reader to believe that things happened, because they can mobilise primary and secondary sources to prove what did. Meanwhile, the skip into Louisa's point of view near the end is actually not as jarring as some reviews led me to believe, but her sections feel under-served: she gets far fewer pages than her parents, and the action stops at a point that, while not completely nonsensical, doesn't feel obvious, either.

Thematically, Miss Burma is ambitious: the persecution of the Karens and the persecution of Jewish people around the world are linked by Benny's decision to become a member of the Karens, irrevocably throwing his lot in with his wife's people and putting a target on his own back during the genocide that follows the Second World War. Craig doesn't follow this line of thought very closely, though; unlike Do Not Say We Have Nothing, another novel about how families splinter under political pressure, the big ideas aren't seamlessly integrated into the plot, but rather are mentioned every few chapters by one character or another, presumably so that we don't forget about them whilst reading about affairs or escapes through moonlit jungles. For readers who want their reading to teach them something, Miss Burma will probably be a hit; but such readers could have been just as well served with a biography/memoir blend. For others, including me, the book feels like something of a letdown, and it's not at all clear why it should be on the Women's Prize longlist.

Abandoned at page 118. I started off really liking this book and its vivid descriptions of 1930s and 40s Burma. But as the story progressed I couldn't get invested in the characters. Moving on for now - but I might return to this at some point...

Very beautiful book and I learned so much about Burmese history. Highly recommend!

i have such mixed emotions about this book. on the one hand, there's great writing and a very interesting story line — the lead up to the Burmese civil war and its first two decades. on the other hand, the story line often gets buried under an avalanche of other extraneous stories — particularly the overwrought romantic ones — that take the edge off what would have been a knock out historical novel.

While this story is incredible, I struggled with the author’s writing style. The point of view changes throughout the book, but it sometimes changes in the middle of a paragraph which I found confusing and had to reread sections to understand. There are also quite a few graphic scenes which are glossed over in a way that surprised me. It felt disconcerting to have rape or torture referenced in graphic detail in one sentence and then immediate bounce to the characters thoughts about something else. Perhaps that was the author’s purpose, however, it was odd and trivialized their experiences in my opinion.