Similar to Eloghosa Osunde's Vagabonds!, this is a collection of interrelated short stories that slowly coalesce as the book continues. Hajji Hotak is strongly concerned with the Afghani emigrant experience, following a group of immigrants and their traumas/experiences primarily from the Soviet occupation to the early 2020s. I've never read an Afghani author (much less a speculative fiction author), so I was excited!

However, the book starts off with by far its weakest stories, being almost clichély coy and litficky. We've got our strained father-son relationship. We've got our on-the-rocks marriage where their kid disappears and brings the couple back together (or does it?). We've got our fake-résumé being treated as a narrative for someone's life. We've got our stream-of-consciousness section to show somebody's overwhelmed with the banality of their life. It felt like first-timer writing class exercises, and I'd seen it all before, feeling like I was reading the wireframes of how to tell an emotional story. It's as if the author simply got better as the book went on, with later stories having subtle and heartrending explorations of the Afghani immigrant life that weren't there at the start, especially through parallels of the Soviet and American occupations.

Still, glad I read it, and what worked for me in the second half really worked.