Alkaf sketches a sickening, somber portrayal of humanity’s violence against itself, the unutterably horrifying reality that a person could be driven mad by hate, how a stranger-someone you’ve never met, much less wronged-could look at you with hatred etched into every line of their face, with hatred pounding through them like blood, and wish you harm. The rest of the story sees Melati desperately trying to find her mother, while death ambles through the empty streets of Kuala Lumpur. Melati is saved by a Chinese lady and forced to leave Saf behind. The Weight of Our Sky opens with the weight of the riots’ reality falling suddenly upon Melati, a Muslim Malay teen, when a Chinese execution mob irrupts into the theater where Melati was hanging out with her best friend, Saf. I went into this book knowing very little about the race riots of 1969 in Kuala Lumpur, but Hanna Alkaf has delivered a very informed yet intimately personal account of one of the most tragic incidents that are folded into the history of Malaysia. It's clear from the outset that The Weight of Our Sky is a labor of great pain, and a labor of tremendous love. **Content warnings: Racism, graphic violence, on-page death, OCD and anxiety triggers.** With a 24-hour curfew in place and all lines of communication down, it will take the help of a Chinese boy named Vincent and all of the courage and grit in Melati’s arsenal to overcome the violence on the streets, her own prejudices, and her djinn’s surging power to make it back to the one person she can’t risk losing. The Chinese and Malays are at war, and Mel and her mother become separated by a city in flames. On the evening of May 13th, 1969, racial tensions in her home city of Kuala Lumpur boil over.
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.īut there are things that Melati can't protect her mother from. Melati Ahmad looks like your typical moviegoing, Beatles-obsessed sixteen-year-old.
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.
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