*COURTESY OF PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY*
Eighteen-year-old Cam
Scott is angry. He's angry about his absent dad, he's angry about being
angry, and he's angry that he has had to give up his Ottawa basketball
team to follow his mom to her new job in Vientiane, Laos. However, Cam's
anger begins to melt under the Southeast Asian sun as he finds
friendship with his neighbour, Somchai, and gradually falls in love with
Nok, who teaches him about building merit, or karma, by doing good
deeds, such as purchasing caged "merit birds." Tragedy strikes and Cam
finds himself falsely accused of a crime. His freedom depends on a
person he's never met. A person who knows that the only way to restore
his merit is to confess. "The Merit Birds" blends action and suspense
and humour in a far-off land where things seem so different, yet deep
down are so much the same.
This is my fourth attempt at an
introductory paragraph for this post. I am literally clueless about where to
start. Should I begin with how impressed I was with the writing? How Powell was
able to capture that which makes us all human and encase it with words, plop
them down in circumstances we possibly couldn’t understand, slap them with some
names and introduce them to us as her characters? How, towards the end, this
book became something larger, something much beyond what I expected?
(I can hear the fridge humming as I sit and
stare at the blinking cursor that seems to mock at the sudden deficiency of my
virtual loquacity. No, seriously, what has happened to me? There is every
possibility that it’s because it’s been inexcusably long since I last wrote
anything resembling a book review. That said, I’ll still shamelessly throw in
my regular excuse: college life is screwing with me.)
I have read books set in places, casting
people geographically, ethnically, and culturally contrasting to the author’s.
While most of them treaded upon that road which was less travelled by, they did
so with a sense of caution. They knew how they were susceptible to errata, and
how they could multiply in terms of consequence, however meticulous their data
collection might have been. And so the tragedy remained that the audience could
never fully get under the layers of the characters. Books starring POC
characters became the sort of thing that you had on GR shelves labelled POC and
as a bullet point in Diversity In Books campaigns. This book is that rare book
that goes the whole way FLAWLESSLY. I won’t pretend I know the mechanics of how
Laos and its people run (I don’t) – but I could immediately relate to the
characters, being Asian myself. How Seng
was fascinated by America – land of the rich, home of Hollywood. Or the picture
of it in his mind. How the locals immediately resorted to head-shaking and
frowning when they see a boy and a girl together. How Lao guys don’t think too
much before throwing an arm around another guy’s neck. How two members of a
family don’t see shame in sharing a bed together. How an individual puts his
family before himself. How they can’t understand why the white-skinned people
would dry-wipe their asses after having a crap. All little things, especially
in the way these facts are thrown in the readers’ faces like a careless
inconsequential detail. But they went a long way in defining those tricky edges
of the characters.
This book teems with life. There is that
boy who’s dealing with culture shock – starting with the fact that he has to
shit into a hole in the ground. Like he already doesn’t have enough to deal
with – anger management issues, mom issues, dad issues and homesickness. There
is that girl that survives alone through all the shit life throws at her and
becomes guarded to the point that she shies away from the possibility of love.
There is her older brother who feels the weight of the title as the head of the
family after being abandoned repeatedly – first by his parents, then his older sister. A weight further amplified by the sense of his
failure in the same. Khamdeng with his loyalty. Somchai with his capacity to
love. Sai with his wisdom and patience. Julia with all her sins. All merit birds. The victory of this book is that it tries to
get under all the layers of most of the characters – including the ones
skulking on the periphery of the main plot.
At first, I didn’t get why only Cam got a
first-person. I mean, this story is as much as Seng’s and Nok’s as his, right?
But then Somchai rebukes Cam for thinking only about himself, contrary to the
Lao and I realized that might be it. That’s when I got my hint this story was
on its way to evolving into something more.
Yes, by that I’m implying that I judged
this book. It had every promise of turning into a love story spanning across
borders of all sorts – and then suddenly it was not just that. In fact,
somewhere around the middle I desperately wished it had stopped at a love story.
At first, the plot steadily climbed the plot hill at a measured pace and then
things crashed and burned. Spontaneously combusted. And I was the sole survivor
– left to collect the pieces and make sense of it. That was the thing I
disliked the most about this book – the incredulous rapidity with which a
series of unfortunate events unfolded. The middle was the lowest point of the
book – the peak of the plot hill felt staged.
Despite that and other minor failings, this
book is a must read for all those who scream blood for diversity in books. This
is a book that you should read at least twice – first to read the lines, second
to read between them.
VERDICT:
4 STARS
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