Reviews with content warning for Mental illness - The Weight Of Our Sky

This book is so incredibly heavy and powerful. The window it opens into both mental illness, as well as the conflict that happened in Malaysia in 1969 is deeply hard hitting. Though I do not have OCD, the depictions of struggling with intrusive thoughts and generalized anxiety are a near perfect mirror to my own experiences.

The writer's voice and style is captivating, really putting the reader in the shoes of Melati as she attempts to navigate horrific events while finding her own strength and courage. Really, this book has multiple different stories tied up in it and I'm just blown away by how much of the conflict the author was able to portray from the eyes of those who were caught in it.

This is another book that should be taught in schools instead of some of the other garbage.

Content Warnings

katselvocki's review against another edition

Go to review page

emotional informative tense medium-paced

Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

Content Warnings

farbooksventure's review against another edition

Go to review page

emotional tense fast-paced

Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.0

The writing is simple and easy to follow in this novel. It's also pretty short (less than 300 pages). No wonder, The Weight of Our Sky can be a pretty fast read. Even though the writing is simple, I can still feel the protagonist's emotions vividly. I think the book also has one of the most memorable opening lines that I ever read.

That being said, I give this 3 stars because I crave a more nuanced exploration of the themes that appear throughout the book. Don't get me wrong, I appreciate the fact that I can learn about Malaysia 1969 riots from reading this novel. I also like that we have an OCD rep in this one. Not to mention the realistic depiction of what having mental illness feel like in that era. This sadly still happens nowadays.

While reading, I don't really feel like we see the protagonist's complex inner struggle below the surface. This fact leaves me feeling personally unsatisfied.

In the end, I would highly recommend this book to younger readers or new readers in the historical fiction genre. If you're looking for a short historical fiction to read, this book is also for you.

Content Warnings

quietkristina's review against another edition

Go to review page

dark emotional sad tense fast-paced

Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.0

Cross-posted from my blog: http://quietandbusy.blogspot.com

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.

Content Warnings

More...