Reviews - Brother | The StoryGraph

622 reviews for:

Brother

David Chariandy

4.03 AVERAGE

megelizabeth's review

4.5

challenging dark emotional reflective sad slow-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Character

"Francis was my older brother. His was a name a toughened kid might boast of knowing, or a name a parent might pronounce in warning. But before all of this, he was the shoulder pressed against me bare and warm, that body always just a skin away."

This is a brilliant, beautiful, soul-destroying book. The writing is very strong and the non-linear narrative is very well-crafted, and I adored the central relationship between brothers Michael and Francis, which is portrayed with such honesty and devastation. There's also a super interesting set of side characters and so many other important relationships are explored too.

This book provides so much to think about and reflect upon in its themes of grief, trauma, familial expectations, living as an immigrant, poverty, race, sexuality, police violence, and friendship and community, and it's one that I'm sure will stay with me for a long time.

My only criticism is that I struggled to feel connected to the time period. Most of the book is set during the 1980s and 1990s, but for reasons I can't quite articulate, it felt very contemporary and I honestly wouldn't have batted an eyelid if every word had been the same but it had been set today. I'd still highly, highly recommend it though, as everything else about it is so fantastic and brutal and important and devastating.

Content Warnings

alicianh's review against another edition

5.0

4.5...Damn, that ending hit me hard.

emilydoucette's review against another edition

3.0

emotional reflective slow-paced

Plot or Character Driven: A mix

Strong character development: Complicated

Loveable characters: Complicated

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

verbamatic's review against another edition

5.0

This is an elegiac account of being a child of poor immigrants in small-town Ontario in mid-90s. It was very well-written, and the main point of the book wasn't immediately obvious. I think it is about how little poor people, especially immigrants, are misunderstood and mishandled by the wider society. It is a short and easy to read novella, and I would recommend it to anyone looking for a sample of contemporary Canadian fiction.

kylarenreads's review against another edition

5.0

This book does an amazing job of explaining relatable grief, but detailing that complex grief is it's own different and monster, with harsher symptoms that are much harder to treat, to the point of being untreatable in some cases. This felt so intimate and personal, like letters from a friend sharing what's been going on in their life over the last few years. I am amazed by the layers of understanding, the complexity of the characters and their relationships, especially for such a short book. A powerful piece! For Netflix fans, the story isn't parallel, but the setting feels like a Canadian parallel to the community presented in Chewing Gum.

bjr2022's review against another edition

3.0

The blurbs for this book use words such as “pulsing” and “riveting” and “charged,” but I found this to be a very quiet, atmospheric character study of a place and people: the neighborhood of a black, brown, and mixed-race group of young people outside of Toronto in a story about two brothers’ struggles because of racism and therefore their station in life. I liked the book and was interested in the people, but I was not riveted. There is one particularly important time jump at the end of the book that is so awkward that it affected my emotional reaction; I was upset by the scene, but I was more affected by my editor’s head screaming, “This could be done so much better. This doesn’t work and is stuck in here in a manipulative way.” And this was followed by an even more enigmatic time jump that left me completely confused about when in time I was, such that, with just a few pages left, which managed to contain even more awkward time jumps, I read gnashing my editor’s teeth rather than being emotionally blown away, as I’m sure was intended.

The book is a fairly standard lyrical, contemplative literary illumination of a population I knew nothing about. So I appreciate knowing. But I really wonder at cover copy that is so different from the book I read. I know that most often writers who blurb books do not actually read them. They may receive a few chapters and suggestions of things to say. If that is the case here, whatever was conveyed to them was ill-advised because the reader’s opinion (mine) will quickly be affected by resentment at false advertising. However the book has received numerous awards, so there is also the possibility that it’s just not my cup of tea.