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starrysteph 's review for:
How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder
by Nina Swamidoss McConigley
A sharp and dark recollection of two sisters who kill their uncle - featuring a cheeky narrative voice, lots of 80s culture, and girls who feel like they are split in two.
Georgie Ayyar and Agatha Krishna live in rural Wyoming with their mom, their mostly-at-work dad, and now 3 members of their extended family who just moved from India. The sisters soon realize that their uncle Vinny must die. And Georgie blames the British, her Indian-American identity and history, and a whole lot more that slowly starts to unravel.
“I know that what you really like is white crime. It's less interesting if it's a brown girl who's dead. Even less if it's a brown man. Sure, you like our bodies-you always have. Our bodies plucked tea. Cut cane. Picked cotton. Were your ayahs. Soldiers. Drivers. Sweepers. Cleaned up all the messes you left behind …. Is it more interesting when the brown girl kills? Is it interesting when she says, This is enough?It is an acknowledged truth that to be a girl, is to be extracted. Girls, we are taken. For once, we were the ones who were going to extract. We wanted to be the ones to take.”
The story is told partially in second person and partially in first, and hops around time a bit, with Georgie sometimes offering up future knowledge. We know from the start that their uncle will die, but we don’t know how or why. And this book is about so much more than a murder.
It’s about trauma and sisterhood and how you might segment yourself in order to survive. It’s filled with classic pop magazine quizzes and 80s references and the agony of becoming a teenager. It’s about the power of language and what it means to exist as an Indian-American in Wyoming in 1986.
Georgie’s voice is SO strong and I felt her emotions at every moment. The prose is specific, heightened in a very tween way, and (sometimes sneakily) quite deep. The mixed media aspects (mostly quizzes, with some listicles that Georgie creates) are brilliant and helped me process each staggering moment alongside Georgie.
“When you're colonized, it's like the words in your throat are dissolving like a cough drop, disappearing into an imposed mask of sweetness that keeps the noise your body's yearning to make from coming out. Killing my uncle was like screaming. And we had to scream. At the end of the day, we knew that no acknowledgment, no apology, no rewriting of our history could ever change how we felt. We didn't want a sorry. We wanted it to stop.”
This book was honestly not at all what I expected, but I’m very glad I picked it up.
CW: rape, murder, death, child abuse, incest, eating disorder, fatphobia, racism, xenophobia, pedophilia, animal cruelty, animal death
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(I received an advance reader copy of this book; this is my honest review.)
Content Warnings
Graphic: Animal cruelty, Animal death, Child abuse, Death, Eating disorder, Fatphobia, Incest, Pedophilia, Racism, Rape, Xenophobia, Death of parent, Murder