Unfortunately I had to DNF this one. I really struggled to get into it and struggled with the format.

This is a hearwrenching tale of family and their struggle to find themselves after the loss of their matriarch. It tells of a woman's strength to persevere through the most difficult circumstances.

The drawn-out style of writing is not the style of writing I like to read. Therefore, I’m not the right reviewer for this book. There are others who appreciate this style of writing and they will reveal veracious reviews.

I never realised that this was the 2nd book in a series, but it didn't spoil my enjoyment. I enjoyed everything about this book from the plot, the characters and even the book cover. It was certainly a page turner and shall be looking out for the 1st book soon. Highly recommended.

My thanks to Netgalley and the Publishers for my copy.

Not realizing this was a 2nd installment in a series, I thoroughly enjoyed this novel of Japanese- occupied Malaya. Well developed characters and sensitive writing contributes to an engrossing book. I will definitely look out for the 1st installment. Recommended.

The characters are interesting and the plot is engaging. I can't stop reading this book and wish this book was longer.
I will read her first book in this series, The Woman Who Breathed Two Worlds because I love the writing style so much.
Thank you NetGalley for my advanced review copy.

Everything I loved about the first book--the strong, stubborn female characters, the detailed descriptions, the memoir-like childhood-to-death scope of the story--was missing here. The main character is passive, her narration barely mentions the world around her except as it relates to her own immediate needs, and the story skims over a few years of World War II and then abruptly ends (with an unsatisfying epilogue). I forced myself to finish it and wish I hadn't bothered. This does not even seem like the same author as the first book and I suspect the writing was rushed to follow on the success of the first.

I loved the first book in this series - The Woman Who Breathed Two Worlds. That was the story of a woman in Malaya who witness the change of her area when the British colonize. Her oldest son is educated in England and she has huge hopes for him that he fails to live up to. He marries a Chinese girl to please his mother. This book picks up immediately after the death of the protagonist of the first book. Her Chinese daughter-in-law tells the story of how they survived the Japanese occupation of World War II.

I was a bit reluctant to pick this book up because of the time period. I know that Japanese occupations in Asia were brutal. This book does talk about one massacre but overall it keeps a much narrower focus. It looks at how this one family survived the war. They know people in the resistance but that isn't talked about much.

One of the conflicts was knowing how to react to the Japanese. They were invaders and they could be cruel but they also allowed Asian people into high ranking jobs that the British establishment would have never allowed. Our narrator Mei Foong's husband, Weng Yu is given a job that he has always wanted by the Japanese. She has learned that her husband is a coward. He would head to bomb shelters first before helping her or their children. She has lost a lot of respect for him. He is in turns indifferent and cruel to her. Mei Foong learns to grow her own food and sells her mother's jewelry in order for her family to be able to eat. The family basically keeps their heads down and does what they have to do to survive unnoticed.

"If anyone had called me a collaborator to my face, I would have recoiled. As far as I was concerned, we were only giving the Japs our unwilling cooperation."


This is a shorter book than the first one. It only covers the years of the war. It mostly the story of the disintegration of a marriage and a woman's finding strength in herself that she didn't know she had set against a backdrop of war instead of a novel about the war. It isn't necessary to read the first book before picking this one up but it adds to your background knowledge of the area and the characters.

I would recommend this to anyone who likes historical fiction. Mei Foong is a great character. She grows from a shy, pampered, upper class bride into a woman who knows her worth and is able to take care of herself.

I loved this book, a lot. With an incredibly strong female protagonist, sympathetic and believable characters, an abundance of historical details, and complete immersion into the cultural melting pot of 1940s Malaysia it ticked all of the boxes that I normally look for. My only complaint is that even those big events that could have held some driving action were still focused almost entirely on Mei Foong and not the action. But, with that being said When the Future Comes too Soon has this wonderful slow-burn effect where the minutiae suck you in and it becomes impossible to look away.

After reading The Woman Who Breathed Two Worlds the first book in the series, I jumped at the opportunity to read this second book. It continues the history of Malaya from the next generation dealing with WWII. It gave me a perspective I hadn't had before of what happened to that part of the world. My education seems rather USA restrictive. It seems if you are teaching history that it should be more global. They are called World Wars.

Though I miss the main character of the first book, we are introduced to a new generation dealing with new governments and loyalties. I found the new main character equally engaging.

The author uses some words or phrases to help the reader feel the ambiance of the time and place without it causing a distraction. And to get to hear about the female point of view on both of these books is so rewarding. I love Herstory! There is not enough of it out there!

This is the sequel to The Woman Who Breathed Two Worlds and I received a free copy from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. I really loved The Woman Who Breathed Two Worlds and I was a bit wary about the sequel because I felt like I would always be comparing the two and it wouldn't be me judging the book on its own merits, rather in comparison to the first book in the series.

This book was very different to the first book in some ways and similar as well. Mei Foong was a completely different person to Chye Hoon and her voice and her decisions made sense for her characters, as aggravating as they could be for me as a reader. One thing I really loved about this book, which was the same as the first book, was how real it felt. Mei Foong didn't make the sensible decision or the decision you wished she would make and the ending definitely wasn't a 'happily ever after' for her but that made it even more realistic for me. Considering this book was written as Mei Foong looking back on her life, there were several events where she said she outright regretted how she acted and I loved that. It didn't fit in the usual narrative and it's one of the charms of this series. The characters all felt really realistic and you could understand their motivations even though you didn't agree with them.

This book was set firmly in the real world, from the talk about real life passing to the historical research, right down to how the Japanese would look on their defeats in the war and the rate of inflation. I love the author's writing style, I feel like it really suits the story she tells. I really liked reading about the time period this was set in, how Mei Foong's feelings towards the British and the Japanese were complicated and how she was trying to keep her family together, at the same time as wanting the Japanese out of her home.

That being said, compared to the first book in the series, I didn't like this one as much. It didn't go as quickly for me. I think this opinion is personal to me but I preferred the character of Chye Hoon to Mei Foong and I preferred the narrative style of birth to death which was the style in the first book, as well as the slow-moving nature of the first book. On the other hand, I really liked how this sequel showed us another side of Chye Hoon and her various friends and relatives. I am so glad that this sequel followed Chye Hoon's daughter-in-law, rather than any of her biological children, as well as following another woman, rather than a male character. Women were very limited in their choices and Mei Foong was different to Chye Hoon, as well as being married to someone a lot different to her father-in-law. It was an interesting flip to see how Mei Foong did her best for her and her family to survive in a world where her opinion was not respected as much as her husband's, because it was so different to what Chye Hoon would have done and they had very different situations.

As a standalone book, I would probably give this four and a half stars and I would definitely recommend it. Since I can't give it four and a half stars, I would round it up to five stars because I would still buy a hard copy of this book if I get the chance and if another story is posted in this series, I would jump on it without a second thought.

"The Woman Who Breathed Two Worlds" followed the life of Chye Hoon, a strong-willed Nyonya girl who becomes the matriarch of her mixed-heritage family in early 20th-century Malaysia. "When the Future Comes Too Soon" picks up shortly after where "The Woman Who Breathed Two Worlds" left off, with the death of Chye Hoon. Now the family's story is narrated by Mei Foong, Chye Hoon's refined, upper-class Chinese daughter-in-law, who married Chye's oldest son, Weng Yu, the one who held such promise but has turned out to be something more like a failure, or at least, utterly unsuited for the life he has been forced to live. Now it is up to Mei Foong to preserve the family during the WWII Japanese occupation.

Although "When the Future Comes Too Soon" is an immediate sequel to "The Woman Who Breathed Two Worlds," it is not a copy of it. Mei Foong has a very different narrative voice than Chye Hoon, and their circumstances are utterly different as well. While Chye Hoon was a rebellious girl who learned to appreciate her native culture, which was rich, unique, and slowly disappearing, and who become a successful entrepreneur and an imposing matriarch following the death of her husband, Mei Foong was a delicately beautiful highborn Chinese maiden who was brought into the family as much as a status symbol as anything else. Chye Hoon's story was one of a woman trying to present the beauties of her culture to others, and was comparatively slow-moving, full of the scents and sights of turn-of-the-century Malaysia, as Chye described her Nyonya cooking and her attempts to peddle kueh cakes. Mei Foong's story is sparer and faster-paced, jumping in immediately into the action of the first Japanese bombardment of the island, and following the family's scramble to find each other, flee to the countryside, return back to the city, and figure out how to live under material privation and Japanese occupation. While both books are at their heart tales of survival, physical and cultural, the survival is of a different nature in each.

Mei Foong's struggles to keep her family alive and together are riveting, as she deals with impoverishment and physical danger while taking care of an unreliable husband, an aging father, and multiple small children. Her struggles to understand her culture and her stance towards it, though, are perhaps more important in a deeper sense. As a Malaysian-born Chinese woman, educated in both Chinese and British culture, she, like her husband, is torn between her heritage and her education. She speaks English and admires many of the advances the British brought Malaysia, including things like modern medicine and the education of women to work outside the home. At the same time, she, like many, is horrified when the British abandon Malaysia and its people at the first sign of Japanese attack. And although the Japanese can be harsh masters, they also work to foster pan-Asian feelings and make a point of putting Asians in positions of authority, something the British would never have even considered. The Malaysian characters finding themselves occupied and subjugated once again, and have to ask themselves: is one master really any better than the other? Do the benefits of British civilization outweigh its racism?

These are heavy questions, but they don't weigh down the story: the main focus is always Mei Foong's feelings, her family, her marriage, and her growing attraction to another man. The ending, like that of the first book, is bittersweet: bitter because Mei Foong regrets the chances she let slip, and sweet because of the chances she did take. "When the Future Comes Too Soon" is a rich and compelling story, filled with realistic and sympathetic characters, about a complex and multifaceted culture that comes to life on the page.

My thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for providing a review copy of this book. All opinions are my own.