The Weight of Our Sky by Hanna Alkaf

 

The next prompt in the StoryGraph Onboarding Reading Challenge was to read a book that I found on their community page. I was hoping to see a book on there that I already owned, but I didn't see any of those when I looked. So instead, I scrolled down until I found something that looked interesting. I ended up with The Weight of Our Sky by Hanna Alkaf. I hadn't heard of this young adult historical fiction novel before, but I was intrigued by its setting in 1960s Malaysia. I had never read anything set in that time or place, so I decided to give it a try.

The story follows a sixteen year old Malay girl named Melati who lives in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. It is 1969 and she spends most of her days going to school, watching movies with her best friend and listening to her extensive record collection. She is hiding a secret deep inside herself however--she has OCD. She can't stop counting things in head, tapping items, and walking certain amounts of steps. She believes that there is a djinn living inside her, making her enact these rituals. If she doesn't obey, she is afraid that the djinn will kill her mother, so she does whatever counting tasks he demands. As her efforts to seek medical help for this in the past were not successful, she tries to conceal her struggles from everyone. Each day she hides a long, frantic routine of counting and worrying underneath her (mostly) cool exterior.  

However, Melati's careful balancing act is thrown into disarray when tensions between the Malays and Chinese in her city erupt into a violent race riot. Melati is away from home when the dangers strikes, and a police-enforced curfew and several downed phone lines prevent her from contacting her mother. All of her anxieties bubble up to the surface and the djinn inside her kicks into overdrive. She constantly imagines her mother dying in various horrible ways, and her counting and tapping become noticeable to others. In order to make her way back home across a city destroyed by violence and reconnect with her mom, Melati must find a way to quiet the djinn inside of her and show greater courage than she's ever had to before.

This novel's strong point was its historical setting. I had never heard of the 1969 race riots in Malaysia before now, and I appreciated how this book opened my eyes to what happened back then. I also enjoyed Alkaf's descriptions of life in Kuala Lumpur. The city really comes to life in her pages, and the destruction caused by the riots is all the more heartbreaking for it.

Melati's character was also very strong. Her struggle with OCD was explained well and felt integral to the story. By writing the disorder as a djinn, Alkaf effectively made it another person that Melati interacted with. The djinn's constant prodding to count, tap, and step in certain ways was very intrusive and did an excellent job of conveying how much Melati was suffering. I don't have any experience with OCD, so I can't tell for sure, but it felt like an accurate depiction. 

Where I thought the story was a little bit weaker was towards the last third of the book. Eventually, the whole plot just becomes Melati running from one place to another, dodging gunfire and other violence in an effort to find her mom. It started feeling repetitive, which sounds strange because these are obviously not boring events, but it was just a lot of the same type of things happening. This wasn't a big enough issue to seriously impact my overall enjoyment of the story though.  

The Weight of Our Sky was a quick and emotional read with good representation. Its exploration of mental illness and its inclusion of a piece of history many readers won't know make it unique and worth taking a look at. I didn't form a deep attachment to it, but I did learn quite a bit from it. I'm glad that StoryGraph randomly steered me in its direction. 

Challenge Tally

StoryGraph Onboarding 2020 Challenge: 10/12

Total Books Read in 2020: 85