Week 2
This week has been okay. A slow return to work, some reading. Watching Gilmore Girls as a way to comfort myself about my existential dread. It’s been an excellent week for reading, if I’m being honest.
But The Girl by Jessica Zhan Mei Yu
I adored this book. I started reading this, thinking it would be like a lot of contemporary fiction; the character is unlikeable, can’t relate to others, is remarkable and unremarkable at the same time. Cue boring storyline.
This went above and beyond my expectations.
But The Girl is about Girl, who was born in Australia to Malaysian parents. She bears the weight of her immigrant parents’ dreams - she must study, work hard, live the life they never had. They do her chores, feed her, house her into her PhD but with the constant reminder that she must achieve better, and that she has a better life because of their sacrifice. She wins a scholarship to work on a creative project in London and Scotland, and so Girl sets off.
This book delves into how to cope with the guilt and weight of your parents’ dreams and sacrifices, missing them whilst being glad of being away from them. Girl experiences racism so similar to my own experiences - the subtle, lingering signs that you don’t belong, you’re different, you’re weird. She experiences microaggressions, of having the politics of race explored around you with no invitation to the discussion… The list goes on.
I loved this book. A lot of it comes from having experienced similar things, but another part of it comes from the way Zhan Mei Yu has written about them. She completely captured the essence and nuance of these situations, and how they can build up until they become intolerable.
Rating: ★★★★★
Brotherless Night by V. V. Ganeshanathan
I’ve heard excellent things about this book, and it won the Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2024. I’m never sure about prizes, and whether the winner/shortlist will be to my liking, so I reserved this from my local library. Having read it, I wish I had bought it for myself.
Brotherless Night is a story about Sashi. She lives in Sri Lanka with her family - her 4 brothers and her parents. Her brothers are your average boys, and they grew up with their neighbour, K. As tensions heighten in Sri Lanka, Sashi experiences firsthand the difficult choices that have to be made, their consequences, how a single decision can spiral, what it means to have her morals truly pushed to their boundary.
I read this in less than 24 hours. I read the first 100 pages, unable to put the book down, and only putting it down because I promised myself I would read it the next day. This book is excellently written. I felt genuine heartbreak and grief at certain points. Ganeshanathan is so excellent at writing the bonds of family and the relationship between siblings. She’s also excellent at storytelling, making you feel one emotion and then question it just 10 pages later.
This is the kind of book that really makes me remember why I love reading, and how beautiful good novels can be.
Rating: ★★★★★