MARTYR! Kaveh Akbar

Martyr! is a good story when you treat it as an epic of the main character's imagination - that he's detached from reality becomes evident just at the end. I wouldn't say I care for the whole of the book itself, though, nor its main conflict. Cyrus' addictions come from a place of real pain, yet the author chose to play them up mostly as whiny identity stuff. Dude... almost a quarter of the U.S. population has immigrant parents. He's tramatised by loss and loneliness and alcoholism, not by a racism the book itself says he hasn't faced the brunt of. Cooing over ugly babies isn't some awful labour. That's really where this book falls short - it's like Akbar can't explore Real Deep Shit unless it's through poetry.

Being real, the 'he made it all up' headcanon is precisely the only way I can accept the Big Twist. Otherwise, this circling-back-around nonesense is. Estupido. It was very predicatable, but I told myself again & again that it must have been something else. Some other family member. & when my prediction came true I was deeply disappointed. Really, man? Really?

Well but the writing was acceptable. I liked the interspersals and weird dreams more than I liked the actual story LOL. I could read those allllll damn day.

PONTI Sharlene Teo

This one was... aight. It had an immature first-time-writer quality I didn't care for and lacked direction. I loved its down-to-earthness & the strange tinge that kept things interesting. I like stories that aren't afraid to subvert the "requirements" of a book, but Ponti didn't exemplify what I like about them.

Teo's writing style is engaging but tries too hard to sound worldly and tormented. It gets strange at the end in a way that attempts to lure readers in, get them curious and afraid, but falls flat from sheer disinterest and comes off as something thought of merely at the last minute.

This book alternates between three characters' perspectives. While I normally don't mind this, it was a detriment to Ponti because it detracted from the story itself to overexplain largely unimportant elements of characters' lives. These storylines contextualised why the characters were the way they were, but they kept things from happening and made the book feel like an incohesive jumble of tragic people existing.

The MCs' friendship seemed like it would end all dark and twisted but, in what would not normally be a pleasant subversion, didn't. I love that Teo keeps it real - sometimes friendships do simply end because the parties are incompatible. It's an okay story and, for internationally minded people, gives you a glimpse of the Singapore that regular, non-wealthy non-metropolitan people occupy, but this ain't anything to write home about.