The Weight of Our Sky
Ratings10
Average rating3.9
15
Ratings10
Average rating3.9
A music loving teen with OCD does everything she can to find her way back to her mother during the historic race riots in 1969 Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, in this heart-pounding literary debut. Melati Ahmad looks like your typical movie-going, Beatles-obsessed sixteen-year-old. Unlike most other sixteen-year-olds though, Mel also believes that she harbors a djinn inside her, one who threatens her with horrific images of her mother’s death unless she adheres to an elaborate ritual of counting and tapping to keep him satisfied. A trip to the movies after school turns into a nightmare when the city erupts into violent race riots between the Chinese and the Malay. When gangsters come into the theater and hold movie-goers hostage, Mel, a Malay, is saved by a Chinese woman, but has to leave her best friend behind to die. On their journey through town, Mel sees for herself the devastation caused by the riots. In her village, a neighbor tells her that her mother, a nurse, was called in to help with the many bodies piling up at the hospital. Mel must survive on her own, with the help of a few kind strangers, until she finds her mother. But the djinn in her mind threatens her ability to cope.
Reviews with the most likes.
I've seen this book absolutely raved about online, as an amazing, diverse book with an #ownvoices author, and I knew I wanted to read it, I just kept having other things come up with higher priorities. I finally settled down to read it, and....it's exactly what everyone has said. Absolutely fantastic.
Melati, our main character, is struggling with OCD, but as this is set in 1969, it's never diagnosed. She thinks a djinn has taken up residence in her brain, and is giving her horrifying visions unless she does his will. And then riots break out and she and her mother are separated. This book covers an event we were never really taught about here in the US; in 1969 politics in Malaysia reached a boiling point and massive riots broke out between the Chinese and Malaysian populations. It's an event that rips Melati's world apart, and that she fights to survive in this book, while still fighting the djinn in her own head.
The Weight Of Our Sky is a young adult book, but it covers some very weighty topics. Between Melati's mental illness, the death and violence that surrounds her, and the prejudice and bigotry driving it, it's a book to read mindfully. The author includes a content warning at the beginning of the book, as well she should. The detail with which she describes Melati's experience (both in her head and outside of it) is stunning.
Melati is Malaysian, but she somehow finds herself with a Chinese family, and together they confront the tensions between the two groups of people, both their own prejudices and the violence from the roving mobs outside the little house they've holed up in. All the while, she's trying to hide the counting and tapping that keeps the djinn quiet in her head. The book is an extraordinary look at untreated mental illness, and the toll it takes to act normal when your brain is lying to you.
Fantastic book.
You can find all my reviews at Goddess in the Stacks.
Very readable with great pacing but it reads more like middle-grade than YA.
Refreshing to read a particularly dark episode in our nation's past without feeling like you're being lectured to or pushed to adopt certain views. Appreciate that she did not whitewash the incident. A well written YA novel that's uniquely Malaysian.
Very brave of the author to choose this particular setting for her debut and to layer on an OCD compulsion dressed up in djinn form but it was well executed. Maybe the final confrontation was a tad too - Hollywood-y - but it was mercifully brief. Characters are immediately recognisable to Malaysians.
Despite the serious setting (I won't use sensitive), the author didn't use a heavy hand and the narrative was allowed to breathe.
Hope there will be more novels like this, especially for younger readers.
Well done, Hanna Alkaf!
