Tuesday, August 9, 2016

Book Review: Your Heart Is A Muscle the Size of a Fist

TITLE: Your Heart is a Muscle the Size of a Fist
AUTHOR: Sunil Yapa
PUBLISHED: January 2016
CATEGORY: Adult
GENRE: Realistic Fiction (I'm not calling the 90s historical fiction damn it!)
PREMISE: A group of people's lives intertwine during the 1999 Seattle WTO protests.
MY REVIEW: I remember hearing about the Seattle protests, but still being in high school, I admit I didn't really understand what it was about. It probably didn't help that none of the adults in our school liked to talk about unrest in the US like this. Yay, Midwest Bible Belt education. Sigh.
This book does not fully explain it, but it does go into the events that happened through the eyes of different characters there. This definitely feels like a timely book, considering all the protests going on now. In fact, some o the conversations people have that I remember them saying mirror exactly what people have said about things like the Black Lives Matter protests. This took place sixteen years ago. The more things change, the more they stay the same, huh?
Prose wise, this book is phenomenal. It's also very strong pacing and story-wise. Overall, it's a very strong debut. About the only poor things I can say about it are that its messaging is not terribly subtle and that its ending is a little too abrupt and not satisfying enough. But other than those minor issues, this is actually one of the better debuts I've read this year.
WHO SHOULD READ: activists, literature fans
MY RATING: Four and a half out of Five thought provoking reads

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