This is a classic I never got around to before. It’s deceptively short–I was surprised, honestly, by how easy it was to read. But it has stayed with me since I finished–there’s power in these hundred pages. Those hundred pages contain 2 or 3-page vignettes told by Esperanza, a 12-year-old Mexican-American girl growing up in a Latino section of Chicago. It’s 100 pages of details, told in vibrant images, and the vignettes are only loosely connected. The stories individually are simple enough, a little abstract sometimes, […]
Alif the Meh
In a Middle Eastern security state, a young Arab-Indian hacker with the handle Alif shields his clients — whoever will pay, including dissidents, Islamists, and Westerners— from online surveillance. Alif loves an upper class woman, Intisar, who has unfortunately been betrothed to a princely type. Alif is of course heartbroken. But then Alif’s computer is breached by a nefarious “Hand”, despite his expert precautions, and Intisar secretly sends him The Thousand and One Days, an ancient and secret book of the djinn. Things get weird, and Alif […]
You should read this novel about Chechnya.
This is a superb book. “A Constellation of Vital Phenomena” has a main storyline: In a tiny village in Chechnya in 2004, Akhmed, an incompetent doctor, takes his neighbor Dokka’s daughter, Havaa, in search of safety after her father has been disappeared and their house burned down. They walk to the hospital, where a tough woman named Sonja is the head surgeon–and one one of two employees. Sonja has enough to worry about without taking on the care of an 8-year old girl, and when she’s not amputating limbs, she’s […]
This would have been better as just one case history.
Three unsolved and unrelated cases are introduced in the first three chapters of the book. Jackson Brodie, our detective protagonist who, of course, has ex-wife issues and a precocious daughter, goes about solving each of these cases, which slowly are revealed to be connected. This book starts out really well. Atkinson has a real gift for characterization, especially when she describes loss, grief, and frustration–and after the third chapter I was hooked, and curious to see where she’d go from that great set-up. There were […]