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"Mieke Eerkens has written a unique and harrowing account of the era through the history of her parents, and while deeply moving and brilliantly written, the particular backdrops give the story's flavor an air of ambiguity and controversy.... Eerkens' book provides a unique look at a different aspect of World War II, and it's a beautifully told story of an ambiguous situation.
— PopMatters
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This memoir is honest, unflinching, reflective, and carefully researched. . . . Eerkens’s self-awareness and desire to honestly grapple with the history in front of her is worth every sentence. Reality is never an absolute, and truth is always messy.
— Book Riot
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A generational memoir of war and its long-lasting effects on descendants....The author examines the psychology of loss on the part of children caught helplessly in tumultuous events....The sins of the fathers are visited on their children, indeed. Eerkens' poignant book sheds new light on the history of World War II.
— Kirkus Reviews
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A war memoir that reads as hauntingly and movingly as a novel...[A] fresh and courageous look at Dutch, and indeed global, history, and as importantly, at her parents, whose personal growth, strength, and perseverance are nothing short of marvelous. Highly recommended.
— Historical Novel Society
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In this masterful memoir, Eerkens has written an epic account of her family's colonial and wartime past that reckons with the often mysterious and misunderstood legacy of intergenerational trauma. Lyric, meditative, and deeply reported, this is an essential book that reveals so much about what we need to know about being human.
— Jennifer Percy, author of Demon Camp: A Soldier’s Exorcism
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A thrilling, brilliantly told, briskly paced adventure story that could not be more timely. In exploring the resilience of her Dutch parents, who survive fascinating childhoods—he, as a young boy in a Japanese concentration camp in Indonesia, she, as a young girl in a family persecuted by their fellow Dutch citizens for assisting their German oppressors—Mieke Eerkens asks what it means to be at once a victim, a colonist, and a collaborator. All Ships Follow Me is an important work of literary nonfiction and essential reading for Americans wondering about the responsibility they bear in the modern age. It's a book you'll read in one sitting but will be haunted by for years to come.
— Kerry Howley, author of Thrown
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Setting her book within the chaotic and tragic aftermath of World War II, Mieke Eerkens has composed a provocative and beautiful story in All Ships Follow Me that boldly tightens its aperture on a single family's experience, and unflinchingly exposes the welts of history that can affect us all, and the inheritance of a sorrow we share.
— John D’Agata, author of About a Mountain
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The confluence of conflicting war traumas fuels the emotional heart of Mieke Eerkens’ insightful narrative. All Ships Follow Me is an excavation of the scars of war drawn from personal interviews, archival documents, and immersion in the physical and psychic spaces of the past. It is also an imaginative quest to understand how trauma influences generations, sometimes directly through behavioral quirks and aberrations but also through a vulnerability to sadness and the illusion of home.
— Patricia Foster, author of All the Lost Girls