What do you think?
Rate this book
How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder
A bold, inventive, and fiercely original debut novel that begins with an uncle dead and his tween niece’s private confession to the reader—she and her sister killed him, and they blame the British.
Summer, 1986. The Creel sisters, Georgie Ayyar and Agatha Krishna, welcome their aunt, uncle and young cousin—newly arrived from India—into their house in rural Wyoming where they’ll all live together. Because this is what families do. That is, until the sisters decide that it’s time for their uncle to die.
According to Georgie, the British are to blame. And to understand why, you need to hear her story. She details the violence hiding in their house and history, her once-unshakeable bond with Agatha Krishna, and her understanding of herself as an Indian-American in the heart of the West. Her account is, at every turn, cheeky, unflinching, and infectiously inflected with the trappings of teendom, including the magazine quizzes that help her make sense of her life. At its heart, the tale she weaves is:
a) a vivid portrait of an extended family
b) a moving story of sisterhood
c) a playful ode to the 80s
d) a murder mystery (of sorts)
e) an unexpected and unwaveringly powerful meditation on history and language,
trauma and healing, and the meaning of independence
Or maybe it’s really:
f) all of the above.
Summer, 1986. The Creel sisters, Georgie Ayyar and Agatha Krishna, welcome their aunt, uncle and young cousin—newly arrived from India—into their house in rural Wyoming where they’ll all live together. Because this is what families do. That is, until the sisters decide that it’s time for their uncle to die.
According to Georgie, the British are to blame. And to understand why, you need to hear her story. She details the violence hiding in their house and history, her once-unshakeable bond with Agatha Krishna, and her understanding of herself as an Indian-American in the heart of the West. Her account is, at every turn, cheeky, unflinching, and infectiously inflected with the trappings of teendom, including the magazine quizzes that help her make sense of her life. At its heart, the tale she weaves is:
a) a vivid portrait of an extended family
b) a moving story of sisterhood
c) a playful ode to the 80s
d) a murder mystery (of sorts)
e) an unexpected and unwaveringly powerful meditation on history and language,
trauma and healing, and the meaning of independence
Or maybe it’s really:
f) all of the above.
204 pages, Hardcover
First published January 20, 2026
About the author
Nina McConigley
4 books219 followersNINA McCONIGLEY is the author of the story collection Cowboys and East Indians, which was the winner of the PEN/Open Book Award and the High Plains Book Award. She has received grants and fellowships from the NEA, the Radcliffe Institute, Bread Loaf, Vermont Studio Center, and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. She was a recipient of the Wyoming Arts Council’s Frank Nelson Doubleday Memorial Writing Award and a finalist for a National Magazine Award for her columns in High Country News. Her work has also appeared in The New York Times, Orion, O: The Oprah Magazine, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Salon, among other outlets. Born in Singapore and raised in Wyoming, she now lives in Colorado and teaches at Colorado State University.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 1,211 reviews
November 7, 2025
Spoiler warning: 3.5 stars rounded down for a book about a difficult subject: child molestation by a trusted family member.
The blurb: " Summer, 1986. The Creel sisters, Georgie Ayyar and Agatha Krishna, welcome their aunt, uncle and young cousin—newly arrived from India—into their house in rural Wyoming where they’ll all live together. Because this is what families do. That is, until the sisters decide that it’s time for their uncle to die."
The book is an narrative by one of the two sisters addressed to the reader, explaining how they decided to kill Uncle Vinny, who has been molesting them.
Cons: While there is some humor in the book, I found it to be rather depressing.
Pros: There is a surprise ending. The narrative also shows a cultural understanding of the native Americans, using the native names for their tribes vs the the ones given to them by outsiders.
The book also gives the reader an understanding of the two sisters efforts to fit into a different society. The molestation is only briefly mentioned--no graphic descriptions.
Two quotes by the narrator:
"And if you are lost, if you have no idea what I'm talking about... If you're wondering what the big deal is... It's brownness. It's being the Other. It's what happens when people are split, when countries are split."
"But then Vinny Uncle came, and he started in on AK Akka first, and me later. He'd take one of us into the bathroom with him, and when we came back out, we'd be split, from each other, from ourselves."
#HowtoCommitaPostcolonialMurder #NetGalley
Thank You Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage and Anchor for sending me this eARC through NetGalley.
Pub Date Jan 20 2026
March 8, 2026
📚 How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder — Nina McConigley
★★★★☆ 4 Stars
Sharp, inventive, and emotionally haunting: a story of sisterhood, identity, and survival.
How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder by Nina McConigley is set in a small Wyoming town in 1986 and explores what it means to grow up mixed-race and visibly “other” in Reagan-era rural America. At its heart, it’s a powerful tale of sisterhood and the ways identity can fracture under the pressure of trauma and belonging.
McConigley writes with lived authority. She is half-Indian and half-white and was raised in Wyoming, and that perspective shapes the novel’s emotional truth, from the sting of microaggressions to the complicated feeling of being “split” between cultures.
Trigger warning: sexual abuse (pedophilia).
From the start, narrator Georgie Ayyar tells us plainly that she and her sister killed their uncle, and that they had a very good reason: they wanted the abuse to end. The novel then unfolds as Georgie walks us back through the circumstances that led to that moment, layering in both tenderness and rage, memory and meaning.
At the center of this book is the idea of “splits” -- between cultures, between girlhood and womanhood, between what the mind remembers and what it must set aside to survive.
McConigley conveys the experience of being biracial as a constant dividing line, between how you see yourself and how others insist on seeing you. That theme deepens as Georgie reflects on how trauma can create another kind of split: emotional dissociation, a separation that becomes a survival mechanism.
What makes the book even more devastating is the author’s restraint. The abuse is not described graphically; instead, McConigley allows the reader to infer the horror. That choice makes the story easier to read on the surface, but more unsettling to process afterward.. the silence becomes its own weight.
The motif of splitting extends outward into history. Georgie reflects on colonialism and the British reshaping and partitioning of India — an imposed division that alters identity and belonging, and the book draws subtle parallels between these historical fractures and the personal ruptures the sisters endure.
Even with its heavy subject matter, the novel is threaded with dark humor and sharp observation, which makes the narrative voice both engaging and oddly buoyant in places. The structure also takes bold, unexpected turns: several passages appear as multiple-choice “romance quiz” questions reminiscent of teen magazines, horrifying and amusing in equal measure, and a surprisingly effective way to capture adolescent confusion and dread.
I listened to the audiobook, beautifully narrated by Reena Dutt. At just over five hours, it’s a compact listen that still delivers a strong emotional impact.
A beautifully written, inventive, and thought-provoking story about sisterhood, identity, and what it takes to survive. 🎧✨
May 22, 2025
♡ DNF @ 50% ♡
1/5 ⭐️
thank you to Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage, and Anchor, and Nina McConigley for an ARC of this book via NetGalley
okay... i really wanted to read this. i really wanted to LOVE this.. but i just couldn't. i tried to power through but ended up DNF at 50%.
i thought the plot of this story was very confusing. there were many things that were seemingly unnecessary to the story and holes that didn't seem to fix themselves. mind you, of course i only made it to the half way mark... so maybe these resolve themselves later in the story.
one main point of confusion comes from the different names for the same character (ex: AK Akka and Agatha). but to go back and forth between both names without clarification on what it meant was very confusing. same with Thomas.
i felt the quizzes were total left field and had nothing to do with the story. the first one i encountered, "how to know if a boy likes you", left me soo puzzled. i reread the chapter it was in and the chapter after to see if i had missed something. ultimately i felt all of the quizzes added nothing of value to the story and weren't on the same playing field as the plot.
this story (seems) to revolve around sexual abuse, which i felt was not disclosed in the blurb of this story. please be mindful of this trigger warning before reading!
Nina is a very descriptive writer and i could really see myself in the story, but the plot was not it for me.
1/5 ⭐️
thank you to Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage, and Anchor, and Nina McConigley for an ARC of this book via NetGalley
okay... i really wanted to read this. i really wanted to LOVE this.. but i just couldn't. i tried to power through but ended up DNF at 50%.
i thought the plot of this story was very confusing. there were many things that were seemingly unnecessary to the story and holes that didn't seem to fix themselves. mind you, of course i only made it to the half way mark... so maybe these resolve themselves later in the story.
one main point of confusion comes from the different names for the same character (ex: AK Akka and Agatha). but to go back and forth between both names without clarification on what it meant was very confusing. same with Thomas.
i felt the quizzes were total left field and had nothing to do with the story. the first one i encountered, "how to know if a boy likes you", left me soo puzzled. i reread the chapter it was in and the chapter after to see if i had missed something. ultimately i felt all of the quizzes added nothing of value to the story and weren't on the same playing field as the plot.
this story (seems) to revolve around sexual abuse, which i felt was not disclosed in the blurb of this story. please be mindful of this trigger warning before reading!
Nina is a very descriptive writer and i could really see myself in the story, but the plot was not it for me.
March 22, 2026
Because of the title + cover combination, I thought this was going to be a cozy mystery, but HOW TO COMMIT A POSTCOLONIAL MURDER is actually a very dark story about surviving CSA and dealing with racism as a young brown girl living in the United States. This story is, at its heart, about the commodification of brown bodies and the anger, numbness, and hatred that come from repeatedly being boxed in, dehumanized, sexualized, fetishized, and mocked as a young girl of color while coming of age.
I'm sad that the ratings for this book are so mixed. I found the confessional-style narrative, which reads as borderline epistolary, quite compelling and intimate. It's uncomfortable to read about girls who were failed repeatedly by all the adults around them, but unfortunately, this is a tale as old as time. As Georgie points out herself, part of the power of abusers is their ability to keep these narratives silenced, preventing people from getting not just help, but also connecting with other victims and receiving empathy.
This is a depressing book but I did like it and I'll probably be thinking about Georgie and Agatha Krishna for a while. Heed the triggers, especially for the CSA and internalized racism, but if you enjoy books about bottomless female rage and revenge, you'll probably enjoy this.
3.5 stars
I'm sad that the ratings for this book are so mixed. I found the confessional-style narrative, which reads as borderline epistolary, quite compelling and intimate. It's uncomfortable to read about girls who were failed repeatedly by all the adults around them, but unfortunately, this is a tale as old as time. As Georgie points out herself, part of the power of abusers is their ability to keep these narratives silenced, preventing people from getting not just help, but also connecting with other victims and receiving empathy.
This is a depressing book but I did like it and I'll probably be thinking about Georgie and Agatha Krishna for a while. Heed the triggers, especially for the CSA and internalized racism, but if you enjoy books about bottomless female rage and revenge, you'll probably enjoy this.
3.5 stars
May 7, 2025
⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️
A surprising little gem, this book packs a lot into its 224-page frame. We get to explore the beauty and the ugliness of nuclear and extended family, the lasting impact of trauma and its clawing tendrils, the impact of being different in a homogeneous land, the lasting aftereffects of colonialism, and the 80s in all of its glory.
Being in Georgie’s head felt comfortable and familiar, even though we share little in common. Her narrative voice felt natural and she told a complex tale with relative ease.
The power of sisterhood was palpable, as was the muted terror that lives at the heart of the murder, which is really only a single strand of plot among many despite it being featured in the title.
Pick up this book for a quick, but rich look into the messiness of life.
A surprising little gem, this book packs a lot into its 224-page frame. We get to explore the beauty and the ugliness of nuclear and extended family, the lasting impact of trauma and its clawing tendrils, the impact of being different in a homogeneous land, the lasting aftereffects of colonialism, and the 80s in all of its glory.
Being in Georgie’s head felt comfortable and familiar, even though we share little in common. Her narrative voice felt natural and she told a complex tale with relative ease.
The power of sisterhood was palpable, as was the muted terror that lives at the heart of the murder, which is really only a single strand of plot among many despite it being featured in the title.
Pick up this book for a quick, but rich look into the messiness of life.
September 13, 2026
Georgie and Agatha plan to kill their uncle.
Set in rural Wyoming in 1986, the novel begins with Georgie confessing that her uncle is dead and that she and her sister killed him. We are not told why. When their aunt, uncle, and young cousin arrive from India and move into the family home, the sisters initially accept the arrangement as simply what families do. We know from the beginning what will eventually happen, but the novel’s real purpose is to reveal what could drive two young girls to such an extreme decision.
Through Georgie’s sharp, unconventional voice, the story finds moments of humor amid racism, sexism, colonialism, and the awkwardness of growing up Indian American in a predominantly white community. However, this book should not be mistaken for a comedy. Beneath its playful structure and nostalgic 1980s backdrop are horrifying and potentially triggering events involving sexual abuse.
At its heart, this is a devastating story about two sisters trapped in an impossible situation, where family loyalty and self-preservation are placed at odds. What saddened me most was how thoroughly the adults and the systems surrounding Georgie and Agatha failed them. They were left to protect themselves from circumstances they never should have been forced to face, and even their once-close sisterhood was damaged in the process.
The novel also examines how patriarchal power, misogyny, and colonial history can continue shaping families across generations. Georgie can joke about these forces, question them, and blame the British for everything, but her humor never erases the pain underneath it.
Reena Dutt’s narration gives a distinct and affecting voice to these fictional girls, making them feel painfully real. I cared deeply about Georgie and Agatha, not only as characters but as representations of children who have been silenced, disbelieved, or abandoned by the very people responsible for protecting them.
Do not expect the ending to provide easy relief or uncomplicated justice. What remained with me was a deep sadness for two sisters who were forced to make impossible choices because every safer option had already failed them.
Set in rural Wyoming in 1986, the novel begins with Georgie confessing that her uncle is dead and that she and her sister killed him. We are not told why. When their aunt, uncle, and young cousin arrive from India and move into the family home, the sisters initially accept the arrangement as simply what families do. We know from the beginning what will eventually happen, but the novel’s real purpose is to reveal what could drive two young girls to such an extreme decision.
Through Georgie’s sharp, unconventional voice, the story finds moments of humor amid racism, sexism, colonialism, and the awkwardness of growing up Indian American in a predominantly white community. However, this book should not be mistaken for a comedy. Beneath its playful structure and nostalgic 1980s backdrop are horrifying and potentially triggering events involving sexual abuse.
At its heart, this is a devastating story about two sisters trapped in an impossible situation, where family loyalty and self-preservation are placed at odds. What saddened me most was how thoroughly the adults and the systems surrounding Georgie and Agatha failed them. They were left to protect themselves from circumstances they never should have been forced to face, and even their once-close sisterhood was damaged in the process.
The novel also examines how patriarchal power, misogyny, and colonial history can continue shaping families across generations. Georgie can joke about these forces, question them, and blame the British for everything, but her humor never erases the pain underneath it.
Reena Dutt’s narration gives a distinct and affecting voice to these fictional girls, making them feel painfully real. I cared deeply about Georgie and Agatha, not only as characters but as representations of children who have been silenced, disbelieved, or abandoned by the very people responsible for protecting them.
Do not expect the ending to provide easy relief or uncomplicated justice. What remained with me was a deep sadness for two sisters who were forced to make impossible choices because every safer option had already failed them.
April 23, 2025
My thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for this early review copy.
This book is 1,001 tangents held together with baling wire, Elmer's glue and antifreeze. It meanders all over the place and never seems to know what it wants to be. Is it a light-hearted YA coming-of-age novel? Is it a dissertation on the difficulties of dealing with racism in small town America? Is it a dark tale of two sisters being sexually abused by their uncle until they are driven to murder him? It is all three of these, and they do not coexist comfortably on the page.
The blurb writers really dropped the ball by not making it clear that the girls kill their uncle because he is sexually abusing them. I was not expecting that. I feel like I should’ve been warned.
The book opens with a claim that either the British or Ronald Reagan are responsible for the murder of their uncle, but it never delivers on that claim. Their uncle sexually abused them because he was abuser, not because of racism or geopolitical boundaries drawn by British colonizers.
Along with the sin of meandering, this book commits the sin of horticultural incorrectness. That always drives me nuts, especially nowadays when you can easily fact check these things on Google.
I guess the dry humor of that sentence just tickled the author’s funny bone. But go ahead, google it. “Do deer eat daffodils?” I’ll tell you the answer: no, no they do not. Because daffodils are toxic. They are one of the few spring bulbs immune from consumption by the local critters. Sure, they might get a few exploratory nibbles, but local wildlife figures out quickly to avoid daffodils. Maybe this will be corrected in the final copy.
TW: sexual abuse of children; and murder, obviously = that part is not a surprise.
words I looked up
Millers - a small white / gray moth common in western US (Colorado et al), adult form of the army cutworm
Akka - older sister in Tamil
Thangachi - younger sister in Tamil
gopi - Sanskrit for cowherd girl
This book is 1,001 tangents held together with baling wire, Elmer's glue and antifreeze. It meanders all over the place and never seems to know what it wants to be. Is it a light-hearted YA coming-of-age novel? Is it a dissertation on the difficulties of dealing with racism in small town America? Is it a dark tale of two sisters being sexually abused by their uncle until they are driven to murder him? It is all three of these, and they do not coexist comfortably on the page.
The blurb writers really dropped the ball by not making it clear that the girls kill their uncle because he is sexually abusing them. I was not expecting that. I feel like I should’ve been warned.
The book opens with a claim that either the British or Ronald Reagan are responsible for the murder of their uncle, but it never delivers on that claim. Their uncle sexually abused them because he was abuser, not because of racism or geopolitical boundaries drawn by British colonizers.
Along with the sin of meandering, this book commits the sin of horticultural incorrectness. That always drives me nuts, especially nowadays when you can easily fact check these things on Google.
… [Amma] planted hundreds of [daffodil] bulbs in our yard during our first fall at Cottonwood Cross, when I was a baby … Every spring thereafter they’d come up through the snow, and every spring thereafter, the deer would come down from the creek and eat them.
I guess the dry humor of that sentence just tickled the author’s funny bone. But go ahead, google it. “Do deer eat daffodils?” I’ll tell you the answer: no, no they do not. Because daffodils are toxic. They are one of the few spring bulbs immune from consumption by the local critters. Sure, they might get a few exploratory nibbles, but local wildlife figures out quickly to avoid daffodils. Maybe this will be corrected in the final copy.
TW: sexual abuse of children; and murder, obviously = that part is not a surprise.
words I looked up
Millers - a small white / gray moth common in western US (Colorado et al), adult form of the army cutworm
Akka - older sister in Tamil
Thangachi - younger sister in Tamil
gopi - Sanskrit for cowherd girl
June 25, 2025
Thank you very much to NetGalley and the publisher for providing me an advanced reader copy in exchange for an honest review.
I wish I could say this was "not what I expected in a good way" but I feel that the actual content of this book was so jarringly different than what it seemed to have promised, it was hard for me to look past it.
Georgie and her sister Agatha Krishna are mixed Indian/White children born and raised in the 80s in Marley, Wyoming. In some ways they have a typical suburban childhood life in a lower middle-class family, with their father frequently absent working in the oil fields, and their mother doing what she can to keep the family tight. In other ways, they are living the lives of many Indian immigrant families in America when part of their extended family, Georgie's Aunt, Uncle, and cousin, come to live with them for an extended period of time. Georgie's mother is expected to host and provide for them, even though they do what they can to integrate into the American life seamlessly. But this is when the troubles start, as Georgie and Agatha Krishna begin to be secretly sexually abused by their uncle, an experience that leads them to decide to kill him. Part harrowing family drama, part childhood reflection, part magazine quiz about relationships; this story paints a sobering portrait of the desperation of two young children caught between their trauma and identity, pushed to the edge.
If my description of this book seems to be at odds with the back of the book blurb, just know that I was just as surprised as you were about what this book ended up being. In fact, let's look at the blurb directly with some of my annotations:
At its heart, the tale she weaves is:
a) a vivid portrait of an extended family
-- This is true, if nothing else, it painted a family portrait, but only insofar as describing most of the family members as being present without fleshing them out.
b) a moving story of sisterhood
-- I don't know that I would describe this as "moving". There certainly were sisters with a complicated relationship, but it wasn't explored in any real depth.
c) a playful ode to the 80s
-- Had I not read that this was set in the 80s (and the handful of cultural references in the story), I would not have clocked this as an 80s book at all. I envisioned it with my 90s childhood lens and it fit perfectly fine. And let's be clear, nothing about this is playful.
d) a murder mystery (of sorts)
-- Nope, in no way is this a murder mystery.
e) an unexpected and unwaveringly powerful meditation on history and language, trauma and healing, and the meaning of independence.
-- Eh. I remain unconvinced. Again, there are things the story touches upon, but "powerful meditation" is being generous.
But most notably absent in this above list is that the entire crux of this book is based around Georgie and Agatha Krishna killing their uncle because he had been raping both of them in the bathroom for months, and they were so desperate for relief that they plotted to kill him. Don't get me wrong; I don't have a problem with this kind of content per se, but please be honest with me. We have a book called "How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder" with a playfully colorful cover, self described as a playful ode to the 80s and a "murder mystery of sorts". Do you expect this book to, perhaps, be a dark comedy about two sisters getting up to no good or a deeply harrowing story of rape, trauma, and how such severe abuse can crumble relationships between family members? My point being, this was so poorly pitched, it is bound to attract an audience that is not going to appreciate it for what it is rather than what it is promising to be.
But I digress, let's move on from expectations and talk about what the story actually delivered. Frankly, it was all over the place. It seemed to be doing so much that nothing was done well enough to reflect upon. We explore themes of racial inequality, financial insecurity, cultural exchange and differences, sisterhood, the intersection of culture and religion, ethnic identity, and of course, abuse. However "explore" is a generous word for some of the themes touched upon here. "Mentioned" may be more apt. I would have loved to see any of these explored in more depth than the were. The writing was also fairly strange. Our narrator Georgie shifts between the first and second person, talking about her childhood experiences, both the family dynamics and things like camp, school, and neighborhood friends, and then also talking directly to you, the reader, as she confesses to the acts that she's committed. But our dynamic with the narrator is not really fleshed out. This isn't epistolary. She's not writing letters. She's just talking to us, the undefined incorporeal reader. This is clearly a stylistic choice, but it interfered more with the storytelling by making me confused as to who I am supposed to be to Georgie.
This was not a bad book. I actually liked quite a bit of it. It was a quick read, and I wish it would have been longer so we could have sat with some of the themes more. But appropriately blurbing it would have done wonders for managing my own expectations for what this ended up being.
I wish I could say this was "not what I expected in a good way" but I feel that the actual content of this book was so jarringly different than what it seemed to have promised, it was hard for me to look past it.
Georgie and her sister Agatha Krishna are mixed Indian/White children born and raised in the 80s in Marley, Wyoming. In some ways they have a typical suburban childhood life in a lower middle-class family, with their father frequently absent working in the oil fields, and their mother doing what she can to keep the family tight. In other ways, they are living the lives of many Indian immigrant families in America when part of their extended family, Georgie's Aunt, Uncle, and cousin, come to live with them for an extended period of time. Georgie's mother is expected to host and provide for them, even though they do what they can to integrate into the American life seamlessly. But this is when the troubles start, as Georgie and Agatha Krishna begin to be secretly sexually abused by their uncle, an experience that leads them to decide to kill him. Part harrowing family drama, part childhood reflection, part magazine quiz about relationships; this story paints a sobering portrait of the desperation of two young children caught between their trauma and identity, pushed to the edge.
If my description of this book seems to be at odds with the back of the book blurb, just know that I was just as surprised as you were about what this book ended up being. In fact, let's look at the blurb directly with some of my annotations:
At its heart, the tale she weaves is:
a) a vivid portrait of an extended family
-- This is true, if nothing else, it painted a family portrait, but only insofar as describing most of the family members as being present without fleshing them out.
b) a moving story of sisterhood
-- I don't know that I would describe this as "moving". There certainly were sisters with a complicated relationship, but it wasn't explored in any real depth.
c) a playful ode to the 80s
-- Had I not read that this was set in the 80s (and the handful of cultural references in the story), I would not have clocked this as an 80s book at all. I envisioned it with my 90s childhood lens and it fit perfectly fine. And let's be clear, nothing about this is playful.
d) a murder mystery (of sorts)
-- Nope, in no way is this a murder mystery.
e) an unexpected and unwaveringly powerful meditation on history and language, trauma and healing, and the meaning of independence.
-- Eh. I remain unconvinced. Again, there are things the story touches upon, but "powerful meditation" is being generous.
But most notably absent in this above list is that the entire crux of this book is based around Georgie and Agatha Krishna killing their uncle because he had been raping both of them in the bathroom for months, and they were so desperate for relief that they plotted to kill him. Don't get me wrong; I don't have a problem with this kind of content per se, but please be honest with me. We have a book called "How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder" with a playfully colorful cover, self described as a playful ode to the 80s and a "murder mystery of sorts". Do you expect this book to, perhaps, be a dark comedy about two sisters getting up to no good or a deeply harrowing story of rape, trauma, and how such severe abuse can crumble relationships between family members? My point being, this was so poorly pitched, it is bound to attract an audience that is not going to appreciate it for what it is rather than what it is promising to be.
But I digress, let's move on from expectations and talk about what the story actually delivered. Frankly, it was all over the place. It seemed to be doing so much that nothing was done well enough to reflect upon. We explore themes of racial inequality, financial insecurity, cultural exchange and differences, sisterhood, the intersection of culture and religion, ethnic identity, and of course, abuse. However "explore" is a generous word for some of the themes touched upon here. "Mentioned" may be more apt. I would have loved to see any of these explored in more depth than the were. The writing was also fairly strange. Our narrator Georgie shifts between the first and second person, talking about her childhood experiences, both the family dynamics and things like camp, school, and neighborhood friends, and then also talking directly to you, the reader, as she confesses to the acts that she's committed. But our dynamic with the narrator is not really fleshed out. This isn't epistolary. She's not writing letters. She's just talking to us, the undefined incorporeal reader. This is clearly a stylistic choice, but it interfered more with the storytelling by making me confused as to who I am supposed to be to Georgie.
This was not a bad book. I actually liked quite a bit of it. It was a quick read, and I wish it would have been longer so we could have sat with some of the themes more. But appropriately blurbing it would have done wonders for managing my own expectations for what this ended up being.
June 26, 2026
Thoughts
Well this one definitely took me by surprise, I was excepting some mystery like read, turned out to be packed and heavy especially for how short it was. This reads like a diary; of a brown girl in America. However I will say is that this book isn't for everyone but it did surprisingly work for me.
Plot Summary
In the summer of 1986, sisters Georgie and Agatha welcome relatives from India into their family home, beneath the surface of everyday life, dark tensions grow, leading the sisters to believe their uncle must die. As Georgie looks back on the events that led them there, she explores family, identity, and the painful secrets that have shaped their lives.
My Bookstagram
Well this one definitely took me by surprise, I was excepting some mystery like read, turned out to be packed and heavy especially for how short it was. This reads like a diary; of a brown girl in America. However I will say is that this book isn't for everyone but it did surprisingly work for me.
Plot Summary
In the summer of 1986, sisters Georgie and Agatha welcome relatives from India into their family home, beneath the surface of everyday life, dark tensions grow, leading the sisters to believe their uncle must die. As Georgie looks back on the events that led them there, she explores family, identity, and the painful secrets that have shaped their lives.
My Bookstagram
November 30, 2025
3.75 stars.
"This is what being a girl is like. Holding yourself in a specific position, only moving when someone tells you to."
This is the type of novel that you either hate or love/like. It's lit fic with some experimental flourishes, which is definitely not for everybody. I'm not even sure who I can recommend this novel to.
Honestly, this wouldn't have been for me either if it wasn't for the overarching plot involving women's rage and getting revenge on a pedophile. This comes into play quite early on and ever since then, I was locked in. I managed to finish this short novel in a day because I was so engrossed.
The narrative reads like a young woman's diary about her current life, interspersed with fractured thoughts about girlhood and being brown in America. There are historical details and biographies of her family members. It's her attempt to understand the world around her and her place in it, however flawed her narrative and thought process may be. It's equal parts tragic and strangely beguiling in its bluntness.
Like I said, this isn't a novel for everyone. But somehow, it worked for me.
Thank you to Pantheon and NetGalley for this arc.
"This is what being a girl is like. Holding yourself in a specific position, only moving when someone tells you to."
This is the type of novel that you either hate or love/like. It's lit fic with some experimental flourishes, which is definitely not for everybody. I'm not even sure who I can recommend this novel to.
Honestly, this wouldn't have been for me either if it wasn't for the overarching plot involving women's rage and getting revenge on a pedophile. This comes into play quite early on and ever since then, I was locked in. I managed to finish this short novel in a day because I was so engrossed.
The narrative reads like a young woman's diary about her current life, interspersed with fractured thoughts about girlhood and being brown in America. There are historical details and biographies of her family members. It's her attempt to understand the world around her and her place in it, however flawed her narrative and thought process may be. It's equal parts tragic and strangely beguiling in its bluntness.
Like I said, this isn't a novel for everyone. But somehow, it worked for me.
Thank you to Pantheon and NetGalley for this arc.
May 19, 2025
This is a book about sisterhood, revenge, expectations, and how the world changes around you, no matter how much you think you understand it. This short book feels like several things rolled into one. It is a hyper-factual series of exploratory essays (but it's fiction). It is a brutally honest memoir (but it's fiction). Above all, it's a story of sisters and the many ways the world can dissect a girl's shape, race, actions, and potential to tear her and everything she knows apart. Nina McConigley doesn't cut her reader any slack (in a good way!), and her narrator is a witty speaker, unwilling to treat even her darkest moments as confession. This is a book that you have to be willing to immerse yourself in, and when you do, the ending will
haunt you for a long time. It is absolutely a book you could read and reread finding new layers to dissect every time.
Thank you to Pantheon and Nina McConigley for an ARC of this book via NetGalley
haunt you for a long time. It is absolutely a book you could read and reread finding new layers to dissect every time.
Thank you to Pantheon and Nina McConigley for an ARC of this book via NetGalley
July 29, 2026
I picked up this book on a whim because I heard Tayari Jones talk about it (she also blurbed the book) and the title was too intriguing not to give it a chance. This book was more melancholy than I expected and a bit experimental but it is an interesting little novella that makes me want to keep an eye on this author and other things she puts out.
Watch me discuss it more here: https://youtu.be/3ljLkhcPBMY
Watch me discuss it more here: https://youtu.be/3ljLkhcPBMY
May 9, 2026
a brief and reflective novella about one monumental year in the lives of two indian-american sisters growing up in wyoming in the mid 80s.
at the beginning, our young narrator takes a moment to address the reader, dismantling potential racist expectations of an indian-american story, listing all the stereotypical details we shouldn't assume we'll find here. similar reader-addressed chapters are interspersed throughout the book, foiled with with relatively fluffy magazine-style quizzes.
the 80s nostalgia is tangible - MASH, light as a feather stiff as a board, zipping two sleeping bags together to form one big one while backyard camping. all these classic details of the era are recounted with a dark and solemn undercurrent running beneath them, as they are being experienced by two kids who are also enduring deep trauma.
georgie and her sister have a push-pull sibling relationship - they know each other like no one else can, they are brought closer together by their shared trauma, yet there is an inarticulable distance between them. georgie describes a fracturing of the self that accompanies sexual abuse. surviving means becoming fundamentally isolated. sharing their secrets keeps the two sisters together, until it inevitably pushes them apart.
i suppose on paper this is a rape revenge story, but it feels like a melancholic coming of age novel. the murder itself is secondary to the heavy trauma and the complicated sibling relationship.
i liked the sharp young narrative voice, the frank commentary on racism & colonialism, the indian-american cultural details, and the dark emotional tone of the story.
but i think this is just too meandering for such a short book. there are some tangents that feel almost random, many of the secondary characters blur together in my mind, and the book's yearlong timespan passes in a flash. this may have made a bigger impact on me if it had been longer and more fleshed out.
at the beginning, our young narrator takes a moment to address the reader, dismantling potential racist expectations of an indian-american story, listing all the stereotypical details we shouldn't assume we'll find here. similar reader-addressed chapters are interspersed throughout the book, foiled with with relatively fluffy magazine-style quizzes.
the 80s nostalgia is tangible - MASH, light as a feather stiff as a board, zipping two sleeping bags together to form one big one while backyard camping. all these classic details of the era are recounted with a dark and solemn undercurrent running beneath them, as they are being experienced by two kids who are also enduring deep trauma.
georgie and her sister have a push-pull sibling relationship - they know each other like no one else can, they are brought closer together by their shared trauma, yet there is an inarticulable distance between them. georgie describes a fracturing of the self that accompanies sexual abuse. surviving means becoming fundamentally isolated. sharing their secrets keeps the two sisters together, until it inevitably pushes them apart.
i suppose on paper this is a rape revenge story, but it feels like a melancholic coming of age novel. the murder itself is secondary to the heavy trauma and the complicated sibling relationship.
i liked the sharp young narrative voice, the frank commentary on racism & colonialism, the indian-american cultural details, and the dark emotional tone of the story.
but i think this is just too meandering for such a short book. there are some tangents that feel almost random, many of the secondary characters blur together in my mind, and the book's yearlong timespan passes in a flash. this may have made a bigger impact on me if it had been longer and more fleshed out.
April 30, 2025
"But do you know what pioneers do? They colonize. They take things that aren't theirs." ... "We had to become pioneers if we were going to kill him. We had to do what was best for us, no matter how it might affect other people. That's what pioneers do. That's what colonizers do."
Reading this book felt like listening to a new friend tell a story. The writing was natural and conversational, which automatically endeared me to the book off the bat. Up front, the narrator promised to tell a story of a murder, but not in the way you would expect. Before the murder is discussed, Georgie, the narrator, unpacks bits and pieces of her life as a young Indian woman (emphasis on Indian, descended from India, not Indigenous American) growing up in Wyoming with an Indian mother and a white father.
The story is full of nostalgia, wit and humor, but equally chock full of pain, abuse, sisterhood, survival and the instability caused by growing up being labeled as "other" by your peers and neighbors. The book, like the narrator Georgie, can be described as being between two worlds.
This book, the format, and the authors voice, are all so unique and original. I couldn't put this book down. I was hooked from the start and I happily read it in two days. Bonus points because the book also contained a lot of lists (my personal fav), itemizations of feelings and fly fishing (cast/caste), some drawings (MASH forever, iykyk!), and teen magazine quiz intermissions between chapters.
One of my favorite lines in the book is about Sacagawea and Georgie says, "I wondered, if when Sacagawea got to Oregon, she'd felt relieved to have made it, or if she just worried about that these two men were going to make her do next." It's such a perfect line (and also.. so true?).
This book was absolutely wonderful and I highly recommend it for anyone who is looking for a fun but impactful read. Beautifully done.
Thank you, Pantheon and NetGalley for the eARC!
Reading this book felt like listening to a new friend tell a story. The writing was natural and conversational, which automatically endeared me to the book off the bat. Up front, the narrator promised to tell a story of a murder, but not in the way you would expect. Before the murder is discussed, Georgie, the narrator, unpacks bits and pieces of her life as a young Indian woman (emphasis on Indian, descended from India, not Indigenous American) growing up in Wyoming with an Indian mother and a white father.
The story is full of nostalgia, wit and humor, but equally chock full of pain, abuse, sisterhood, survival and the instability caused by growing up being labeled as "other" by your peers and neighbors. The book, like the narrator Georgie, can be described as being between two worlds.
This book, the format, and the authors voice, are all so unique and original. I couldn't put this book down. I was hooked from the start and I happily read it in two days. Bonus points because the book also contained a lot of lists (my personal fav), itemizations of feelings and fly fishing (cast/caste), some drawings (MASH forever, iykyk!), and teen magazine quiz intermissions between chapters.
One of my favorite lines in the book is about Sacagawea and Georgie says, "I wondered, if when Sacagawea got to Oregon, she'd felt relieved to have made it, or if she just worried about that these two men were going to make her do next." It's such a perfect line (and also.. so true?).
This book was absolutely wonderful and I highly recommend it for anyone who is looking for a fun but impactful read. Beautifully done.
Thank you, Pantheon and NetGalley for the eARC!
September 25, 2026
This was a hard read. Dark, moody and the magazine style quizzes were jarring. Read for Texas Book Festival.
June 5, 2025
Thank you to NetGalley and Pantheon for the opportunity to read this book.
Unfortunately, this book was a disappointing read for me. The title was intriguing, the premise had me hooked, but the plot simply did not deliver. I was expecting a dark comedy, in the vein of My Sister, the Serial Killer or Bunny, but this fell short in both aspects. Firstly, I was not expecting the heavy emphasis on sexual abuse that occurred on what felt like every page. This should have been at least hinted at in the blurb. Also, while I loved Georgie's voice, it was hard to hear it under the rambling and vague plot. The author seemed to be trying to take on a wide range of topics, from racism to Indian history to sisterhood and beyond. The same points were repeated over and over, making it feel redundant and confusing. The lack of consistency in plot, time, or even space, along with the large cast of characters, made the novel incredibly hard to follow. The quizzes and little inserts were fun in a nostalgic sort of way, but mostly felt distracting.
Unfortunately, this book was a disappointing read for me. The title was intriguing, the premise had me hooked, but the plot simply did not deliver. I was expecting a dark comedy, in the vein of My Sister, the Serial Killer or Bunny, but this fell short in both aspects. Firstly, I was not expecting the heavy emphasis on sexual abuse that occurred on what felt like every page. This should have been at least hinted at in the blurb. Also, while I loved Georgie's voice, it was hard to hear it under the rambling and vague plot. The author seemed to be trying to take on a wide range of topics, from racism to Indian history to sisterhood and beyond. The same points were repeated over and over, making it feel redundant and confusing. The lack of consistency in plot, time, or even space, along with the large cast of characters, made the novel incredibly hard to follow. The quizzes and little inserts were fun in a nostalgic sort of way, but mostly felt distracting.
May 4, 2026
Very Different than what I was expecting by the title and cover. Thought this was going to be a Satire Type Mystery/Thriller. It is not that.
The book is told by Georgia about abuse she and her sister, Agatha Krishna endure. The girls have both moved to Wyoming. The family is originally from India. In 1986, Georgia’s Uncle, Aunt, and cousin come to live with them. The Uncle is abusive to both sisters. They decide they must kill him to survive this situation. Yet, it isn’t as easy as planned and brings much anguish. The book brings to light the abuse of power by men, by countries, by families. It is a different type of story and it’s hard to take in all the girls endure, but it really resonated with me. I enjoyed Georgia’s storytelling and really loved these characters.
Enjoyed the Ending. Was not expecting it, but it worked well.
Thank you NetGalley and Pantheon for a copy of this book.
The book is told by Georgia about abuse she and her sister, Agatha Krishna endure. The girls have both moved to Wyoming. The family is originally from India. In 1986, Georgia’s Uncle, Aunt, and cousin come to live with them. The Uncle is abusive to both sisters. They decide they must kill him to survive this situation. Yet, it isn’t as easy as planned and brings much anguish. The book brings to light the abuse of power by men, by countries, by families. It is a different type of story and it’s hard to take in all the girls endure, but it really resonated with me. I enjoyed Georgia’s storytelling and really loved these characters.
Enjoyed the Ending. Was not expecting it, but it worked well.
Thank you NetGalley and Pantheon for a copy of this book.
January 25, 2026
2026 reads: 26/300
content warnings: childhood sexual assault, incest, murder
in the summer of 1986, sisters georgie ayyar and agatha krishna welcome their aunt, uncle, and young cousin from india into their rural wyoming home. not too long after, the sisters decide their uncle has to die...and, according to georgie, the british are to blame. she details the violence hiding in their house and in their history, as a mixed indian and white girl living in the west.
WOW, this was incredible. i had literally no idea what i was getting into besides that postcolonialism would play into this somehow—besides that, i just knew i had seen it on a trusted friend’s account and immediately requested it on libby. for all i knew, i was going into a non-fiction💀. i would not recommend this method to other people, seeing as there is some potentially-triggering content (see above).
i’m having trouble properly articulating my thoughts on this book, as i think it’s one you just have to experience for yourself. i’m impressed with how well nina mcconigley tackled themes of CSA, sisterhood, and biracial identity through a postcolonial lens in such a short book. here’s to hoping my library adds cowboys and east indians, which i’m sure will be just as incredible, to the catalog soon.
content warnings: childhood sexual assault, incest, murder
in the summer of 1986, sisters georgie ayyar and agatha krishna welcome their aunt, uncle, and young cousin from india into their rural wyoming home. not too long after, the sisters decide their uncle has to die...and, according to georgie, the british are to blame. she details the violence hiding in their house and in their history, as a mixed indian and white girl living in the west.
WOW, this was incredible. i had literally no idea what i was getting into besides that postcolonialism would play into this somehow—besides that, i just knew i had seen it on a trusted friend’s account and immediately requested it on libby. for all i knew, i was going into a non-fiction💀. i would not recommend this method to other people, seeing as there is some potentially-triggering content (see above).
i’m having trouble properly articulating my thoughts on this book, as i think it’s one you just have to experience for yourself. i’m impressed with how well nina mcconigley tackled themes of CSA, sisterhood, and biracial identity through a postcolonial lens in such a short book. here’s to hoping my library adds cowboys and east indians, which i’m sure will be just as incredible, to the catalog soon.
May 19, 2026
This was an impulse checkout from library . . . The odd title, colorful color and small size made me grab it from new book display. I anticipated a breezy, rather light hearted mystery. Style was what I anticipated and very effective but storyline much deeper. Book is set in small town in Wyoming during the oil bust years of the mid-1980s; main characters are 2 sisters, Agatha Krishna and Georgie Ayyar (named after their mother’s favorite British authors (Agatha Christie and Georgette Heyer), ages 12 and 13. The girls’ father is a geologist; mother is very well educated, from southern India, lonely until her younger brother, his wife and young son come for a permanent visit. The uncle begins to sexually abuse the girls (this is referred to, not described so easier for reader) and this drives the plot as the girls plan how to stop it without telling their mother. Lots to unpack in the book — themes include unintended consequences, relationship between sisters, being “half other” in a very homogenous society and probably others that I have missed. It reads very fast, as it is told in the voice of the younger of the two sisters. Very well done. First novel by an author who has similar background to the sisters.
May 25, 2025
Thanks to Pantheon for the ARC.
The synopsis of How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder is so intriguing, but the writing style unfortunately didn’t resonate with me. This book felt more like a loose collection of childhood moments than a cohesive narrative. The characters felt a little distant or one-dimensional to me—maybe a reflection of the narrator’s isolation. The chapters are interspersed with quizzes in the style of teen/tween magazines (does he like you back?) which I felt didn’t add much to the story. I appreciated that the author touched on important subjects like racism, colonialism, and abuse, but I would have liked to see a different approach.
Readers should be aware the book discusses child abuse and sexual abuse.
The synopsis of How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder is so intriguing, but the writing style unfortunately didn’t resonate with me. This book felt more like a loose collection of childhood moments than a cohesive narrative. The characters felt a little distant or one-dimensional to me—maybe a reflection of the narrator’s isolation. The chapters are interspersed with quizzes in the style of teen/tween magazines (does he like you back?) which I felt didn’t add much to the story. I appreciated that the author touched on important subjects like racism, colonialism, and abuse, but I would have liked to see a different approach.
Readers should be aware the book discusses child abuse and sexual abuse.
January 5, 2026
It’s 1986. Georgie is half Indian, half white. After her uncle and his family arrive from India and move into their house, Georgie and her sister Agatha decide their uncle must die.
That’s not a spoiler.
The topics in this book are heavy, but it doesn’t feel dark or heavy. The writer’s style of storytelling makes it feel like Georgie is telling you, the reader, how all this went down, and the fallout afterward. It’s not your typical plotline.
McConigley included several ‘80s pop culture references and moments in history, like the Challenger and Princess Diana’s wedding.
I consumed this book in nearly one sitting.
Thank you to Pantheon and Nina McConigley for an ARC of this book via NetGalley.
That’s not a spoiler.
The topics in this book are heavy, but it doesn’t feel dark or heavy. The writer’s style of storytelling makes it feel like Georgie is telling you, the reader, how all this went down, and the fallout afterward. It’s not your typical plotline.
McConigley included several ‘80s pop culture references and moments in history, like the Challenger and Princess Diana’s wedding.
I consumed this book in nearly one sitting.
Thank you to Pantheon and Nina McConigley for an ARC of this book via NetGalley.
January 20, 2026
A Severe, Brilliant Novel About Girlhood, Power, and the Stories We’re Allowed to Tell
Watercolor Piece by Demetris Papadimitropoulos
Nina McConigley’s “How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder” is the sort of novel that arrives with a grin and leaves with a bruise. Its title performs a dare: a how-to manual, a satire, a provocation dressed as a joke. The book, meanwhile, does not so much explain itself as arrange the conditions under which explanation becomes suspect. It announces the crime early, declines the pleasures of detection, and turns instead to the more discomforting question: what kinds of violence are already licensed, routinized, taught – and which ones are declared unthinkable only when they disrupt the stories a nation prefers to tell about itself?
Set in 1986 Marley, Wyoming, McConigley’s novel moves through months like a calendar you can’t tear away from the wall. The structure is deceptively neat – January, February, March – and yet the effect is not tidiness but pressure. Months become moral weather. The book is keenly attuned to what time does to the body: how dread turns logistical, how a house becomes terrain, how childhood becomes a series of small competencies learned under duress. You feel the turning of seasons not as renewal but as exposure: winter’s concealments thaw into mud, spring’s rituals ask for cheerfulness, summer’s heat collapses privacy into proximity.
What distinguishes “How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder,” and what will make it divisive in the best way, is McConigley’s refusal to write the book most readers have been trained to demand. There is no courtroom crescendo, no climactic moral accounting, no therapeutic arc in which language saves what language could not stop. Instead, the novel keeps returning to systems – family, school, church, nation – and the way they distribute innocence and credibility like ration cards. The story’s central act is violent, but the surrounding world is saturated with quieter violences that everyone agrees not to call violence: the sanctioned gun curriculum of “safety,” the polite civic rituals of patriotism, the mythology of “independence” celebrated without acknowledging who gets liberated and who gets left behind.
McConigley’s greatest technical achievement is tonal: the book is funny in the way defense mechanisms are funny. It cracks wise to keep the airway open. It flirts with the reader, then refuses to reward the flirtation with intimacy. The prose frequently trades lyrical excess for procedural clarity, which gives the novel its peculiar chill. This is a text that understands how trauma often reads from the inside – not as one long scream but as lists, schedules, controlled breathing, counting. When emotion appears, it’s not performed for our benefit. When the book turns toward pain, it does so without the aesthetic indulgence that can make even serious fiction feel faintly complicit.
McConigley is not interested in building a monster. She is interested in showing how monsters are permitted to look ordinary, and how ordinariness itself can be weaponized. The most destabilizing scenes are not the ones in which harm occurs, but the ones in which the world continues. A May Day dance. A school lesson. A church blessing. A summer night where fireworks are meant to stand for freedom, while inside one home freedom remains a rumor. These are the moments in which the novel’s intelligence sharpens into something like accusation: the demand that children participate in rituals of innocence is not innocent. It is a form of social control. It trains the body to comply, and it trains the community to interpret compliance as proof that nothing is wrong.
The book’s formal play – its shifts into second person, its inserted quizzes, its epistolary fragments – is not ornamental. It is the novel’s ethical engine. The “you” sections are often described, reductively, as confrontational, but their more interesting function is diagnostic. They test the reader’s reflexes. Do you reach for judgment? Do you reach for justification? Do you reach for the comforting posture of the Good Reader, the one who knows the right words, the one who would have intervened, the one who is not like those other people? The novel treats those desires as a kind of appetite, and like any appetite, not automatically moral. Reading becomes a form of consumption, and McConigley wants us to notice what we’re hungry for when we say we want to “understand.”
This is where the book begins to feel startlingly contemporary. “How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder” is set decades ago, but it occupies the moral atmosphere of now – an era of disclosures that have not reliably produced protection, of viral testimonies that become content, of public outrage that can feel indistinguishable from entertainment. The novel understands that modernity has trained us to treat harm as something we can process at a safe distance, with the right vocabulary, the correct stance, the proper hashtags. It also understands how little that stance may matter when the structures that enable harm remain intact.
McConigley’s critique is not simply postcolonial, though colonial history is the novel’s bone structure. The book’s best insights are about continuity: how power reproduces itself through rituals, narratives, and education. The United States appears here as a nation expert at turning violence into curriculum, myth, and scenery. Hunter safety class is only the most literal example. The larger point is that the culture teaches procedural thinking, normalizes sanctioned killing, celebrates national rupture as liberation, and then insists that certain ruptures – the ones committed by the wrong people, in the wrong direction – are beyond comprehension. The book’s central act becomes, in this light, a kind of terrible inversion. The logic is learned from the world. The world is only outraged when that logic is applied inward.
One can feel McConigley writing in conversation with a lineage of “refusal” literature – books that withhold catharsis not as a coy trick but as an ethical stance. “Citizen,” by Claudia Rankine, comes to mind for its use of second person as moral mirror; Bhanu Kapil’s “Humanimal” for its attention to the body as a site where history is metabolized; Maggie Nelson’s “Bluets” for the way fragments can accrue into a philosophy of feeling rather than a plot. In the realm of morally chilly female narrators and the refusal of clean sympathy, one can also hear faint echoes of Ottessa Moshfegh’s “Eileen,” though McConigley’s project is less about individual pathology than about structural inheritance.
And yet the novel’s comparisons are also a trap. The book wants to be unhelpful in precisely the way the publishing world often demands helpfulness: the tidy elevator pitch, the digestible moral takeaway. McConigley keeps cutting the ribbon the reader tries to tie around the story. If you come looking for a redemptive narrative of survival, you will not find it. If you come looking for a clear political tract, you will be unsettled by the book’s intimacy and its unwillingness to legislate your response. If you come looking for a thriller, you will meet something closer to an anti-thriller: a narrative that treats suspense not as entertainment but as lived physiology.
Consider, for a moment, the novel’s fascination with quizzes – those bright, coercive artifacts of adolescent culture that promise clarity. The quiz is an American genre of reassurance: answer these questions, and you will know who you are, what you want, whether you’re “ready.” McConigley’s use of the form is wickedly precise. The quiz’s chirpy authority is grotesque when placed beside coercion. Its binaries – yes/no, A/B, mostly this/mostly that – become a parody of the way culture teaches girls to manage harm through self-surveillance. The quiz asks whether you are choosing, whether you feel pressured, whether you can say no. The reality that the novel is willing to say, without saying it loudly, is that coercion is often what makes those questions meaningless. The point is not to mock teen magazines. The point is to show how a culture can claim to educate while still failing to provide the language that would matter most.
This is McConigley’s special talent: the ability to reveal ideology in the smallest, most banal objects. A church ritual. A school lesson. A calendar page. A comet the children can’t really see, only watch simulated – wonder as projection, transcendence as staged event. The novel repeatedly offers the promise of rescue by “systems” – faith, family, institutions, history’s moral arc – and then shows the promise collapsing into ordinary neglect. Nothing arrives from the sky. No authority descends. The book’s central intelligence is that waiting, in certain lives, is not neutral. It is dangerous.
Still, this is not a novel that flatters its own despair. The most moving element of “How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder” is not outrage – it is the fierce, unsentimental bond between sisters. Their intimacy is not romanticized as pure. It is practical. It is tactical. It becomes a shared language and a shared discipline. McConigley writes their closeness as something forged under pressure, and that forging is at once heartbreaking and bracing: love here is not a feeling so much as a set of decisions.
It is also where the book’s ethical trouble begins – and where it earns its seriousness. The novel does not ask the reader to applaud. It does not ask the reader to forgive. It asks the reader to remain inside the contradiction: that an act can be comprehensible and still wrong, that it can feel inevitable and still carry consequence, that agency may arrive only as a last resort shaped by forces that preceded it. In a culture that is addicted to moral clarity, McConigley offers moral complexity without the usual alibis.
A lesser novelist might have turned this material into sermon or spectacle. McConigley does neither. Her style is too controlled for melodrama, too suspicious for uplift. The book’s coolness is sometimes a risk – a few middle stretches circle the same territory of refusal so insistently that readers may feel a certain emotional starvation, a sense of being held at arm’s length by design. But that arm’s length is also the book’s integrity. McConigley is not interested in making pain palatable. She is interested in showing how palatability itself can be a form of violence.
If “How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder” falters anywhere, it is where its brilliance becomes so self-protective that it occasionally threatens to withhold the very heat that makes literature feel necessary. There are moments when the book’s procedural restraint – so admirable ethically – can verge on affective flatness, and not every reader will want to do the work the novel demands without the usual narrative rewards. But perhaps that is the point. This is a critics’ book, a syllabus book, a book that will be argued with in margins and seminar rooms. It is also, quietly, a book that understands the current moment better than many novels that wear topicality like a badge. McConigley is writing about systems that outlast headlines.
Reading it, you may find yourself wanting to ask the old questions: Was it justified? Was it necessary? Who is to blame? The novel has no interest in handing you those answers, and that refusal is part of its courage. It is not a book about moral purity. It is a book about what happens when purity is not available.
One could imagine, if one wanted to mimic the book’s own forms, a small quiz for the reader:
How do you know if you’re ready to read this novel?
A. You prefer stories that resolve.
B. You can tolerate an ending that refuses to become a lesson.
C. You believe “awareness” is the same as protection.
D. You can sit with contradiction without turning it into a verdict.
If you chose mostly A or C, the book will frustrate you. If you chose mostly B or D, it may not comfort you, but it will reward you – with the sharp, enduring reward of a novel that refuses to lie.
For all its austerity, “How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder” is a work of rare precision. It is formally inventive without being precious, politically alert without being sloganized, emotionally controlled without being inhuman. It is a book that distrusts the easy uses we try to make of suffering – the way we turn it into inspiration, content, cautionary tale, moral proving ground. McConigley’s novel declines that entire economy. It offers, instead, attention: to the ways power hides, to the ways children learn the world too soon, to the ways history lives in the body, and to the ways narrative itself can become another border patrol.
That discipline, that refusal, that intelligence – combined with the book’s willingness to be genuinely uncomfortable – is why it earns a 91 out of 100.
Watercolor Piece by Demetris Papadimitropoulos
Nina McConigley’s “How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder” is the sort of novel that arrives with a grin and leaves with a bruise. Its title performs a dare: a how-to manual, a satire, a provocation dressed as a joke. The book, meanwhile, does not so much explain itself as arrange the conditions under which explanation becomes suspect. It announces the crime early, declines the pleasures of detection, and turns instead to the more discomforting question: what kinds of violence are already licensed, routinized, taught – and which ones are declared unthinkable only when they disrupt the stories a nation prefers to tell about itself?
Set in 1986 Marley, Wyoming, McConigley’s novel moves through months like a calendar you can’t tear away from the wall. The structure is deceptively neat – January, February, March – and yet the effect is not tidiness but pressure. Months become moral weather. The book is keenly attuned to what time does to the body: how dread turns logistical, how a house becomes terrain, how childhood becomes a series of small competencies learned under duress. You feel the turning of seasons not as renewal but as exposure: winter’s concealments thaw into mud, spring’s rituals ask for cheerfulness, summer’s heat collapses privacy into proximity.
What distinguishes “How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder,” and what will make it divisive in the best way, is McConigley’s refusal to write the book most readers have been trained to demand. There is no courtroom crescendo, no climactic moral accounting, no therapeutic arc in which language saves what language could not stop. Instead, the novel keeps returning to systems – family, school, church, nation – and the way they distribute innocence and credibility like ration cards. The story’s central act is violent, but the surrounding world is saturated with quieter violences that everyone agrees not to call violence: the sanctioned gun curriculum of “safety,” the polite civic rituals of patriotism, the mythology of “independence” celebrated without acknowledging who gets liberated and who gets left behind.
McConigley’s greatest technical achievement is tonal: the book is funny in the way defense mechanisms are funny. It cracks wise to keep the airway open. It flirts with the reader, then refuses to reward the flirtation with intimacy. The prose frequently trades lyrical excess for procedural clarity, which gives the novel its peculiar chill. This is a text that understands how trauma often reads from the inside – not as one long scream but as lists, schedules, controlled breathing, counting. When emotion appears, it’s not performed for our benefit. When the book turns toward pain, it does so without the aesthetic indulgence that can make even serious fiction feel faintly complicit.
McConigley is not interested in building a monster. She is interested in showing how monsters are permitted to look ordinary, and how ordinariness itself can be weaponized. The most destabilizing scenes are not the ones in which harm occurs, but the ones in which the world continues. A May Day dance. A school lesson. A church blessing. A summer night where fireworks are meant to stand for freedom, while inside one home freedom remains a rumor. These are the moments in which the novel’s intelligence sharpens into something like accusation: the demand that children participate in rituals of innocence is not innocent. It is a form of social control. It trains the body to comply, and it trains the community to interpret compliance as proof that nothing is wrong.
The book’s formal play – its shifts into second person, its inserted quizzes, its epistolary fragments – is not ornamental. It is the novel’s ethical engine. The “you” sections are often described, reductively, as confrontational, but their more interesting function is diagnostic. They test the reader’s reflexes. Do you reach for judgment? Do you reach for justification? Do you reach for the comforting posture of the Good Reader, the one who knows the right words, the one who would have intervened, the one who is not like those other people? The novel treats those desires as a kind of appetite, and like any appetite, not automatically moral. Reading becomes a form of consumption, and McConigley wants us to notice what we’re hungry for when we say we want to “understand.”
This is where the book begins to feel startlingly contemporary. “How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder” is set decades ago, but it occupies the moral atmosphere of now – an era of disclosures that have not reliably produced protection, of viral testimonies that become content, of public outrage that can feel indistinguishable from entertainment. The novel understands that modernity has trained us to treat harm as something we can process at a safe distance, with the right vocabulary, the correct stance, the proper hashtags. It also understands how little that stance may matter when the structures that enable harm remain intact.
McConigley’s critique is not simply postcolonial, though colonial history is the novel’s bone structure. The book’s best insights are about continuity: how power reproduces itself through rituals, narratives, and education. The United States appears here as a nation expert at turning violence into curriculum, myth, and scenery. Hunter safety class is only the most literal example. The larger point is that the culture teaches procedural thinking, normalizes sanctioned killing, celebrates national rupture as liberation, and then insists that certain ruptures – the ones committed by the wrong people, in the wrong direction – are beyond comprehension. The book’s central act becomes, in this light, a kind of terrible inversion. The logic is learned from the world. The world is only outraged when that logic is applied inward.
One can feel McConigley writing in conversation with a lineage of “refusal” literature – books that withhold catharsis not as a coy trick but as an ethical stance. “Citizen,” by Claudia Rankine, comes to mind for its use of second person as moral mirror; Bhanu Kapil’s “Humanimal” for its attention to the body as a site where history is metabolized; Maggie Nelson’s “Bluets” for the way fragments can accrue into a philosophy of feeling rather than a plot. In the realm of morally chilly female narrators and the refusal of clean sympathy, one can also hear faint echoes of Ottessa Moshfegh’s “Eileen,” though McConigley’s project is less about individual pathology than about structural inheritance.
And yet the novel’s comparisons are also a trap. The book wants to be unhelpful in precisely the way the publishing world often demands helpfulness: the tidy elevator pitch, the digestible moral takeaway. McConigley keeps cutting the ribbon the reader tries to tie around the story. If you come looking for a redemptive narrative of survival, you will not find it. If you come looking for a clear political tract, you will be unsettled by the book’s intimacy and its unwillingness to legislate your response. If you come looking for a thriller, you will meet something closer to an anti-thriller: a narrative that treats suspense not as entertainment but as lived physiology.
Consider, for a moment, the novel’s fascination with quizzes – those bright, coercive artifacts of adolescent culture that promise clarity. The quiz is an American genre of reassurance: answer these questions, and you will know who you are, what you want, whether you’re “ready.” McConigley’s use of the form is wickedly precise. The quiz’s chirpy authority is grotesque when placed beside coercion. Its binaries – yes/no, A/B, mostly this/mostly that – become a parody of the way culture teaches girls to manage harm through self-surveillance. The quiz asks whether you are choosing, whether you feel pressured, whether you can say no. The reality that the novel is willing to say, without saying it loudly, is that coercion is often what makes those questions meaningless. The point is not to mock teen magazines. The point is to show how a culture can claim to educate while still failing to provide the language that would matter most.
This is McConigley’s special talent: the ability to reveal ideology in the smallest, most banal objects. A church ritual. A school lesson. A calendar page. A comet the children can’t really see, only watch simulated – wonder as projection, transcendence as staged event. The novel repeatedly offers the promise of rescue by “systems” – faith, family, institutions, history’s moral arc – and then shows the promise collapsing into ordinary neglect. Nothing arrives from the sky. No authority descends. The book’s central intelligence is that waiting, in certain lives, is not neutral. It is dangerous.
Still, this is not a novel that flatters its own despair. The most moving element of “How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder” is not outrage – it is the fierce, unsentimental bond between sisters. Their intimacy is not romanticized as pure. It is practical. It is tactical. It becomes a shared language and a shared discipline. McConigley writes their closeness as something forged under pressure, and that forging is at once heartbreaking and bracing: love here is not a feeling so much as a set of decisions.
It is also where the book’s ethical trouble begins – and where it earns its seriousness. The novel does not ask the reader to applaud. It does not ask the reader to forgive. It asks the reader to remain inside the contradiction: that an act can be comprehensible and still wrong, that it can feel inevitable and still carry consequence, that agency may arrive only as a last resort shaped by forces that preceded it. In a culture that is addicted to moral clarity, McConigley offers moral complexity without the usual alibis.
A lesser novelist might have turned this material into sermon or spectacle. McConigley does neither. Her style is too controlled for melodrama, too suspicious for uplift. The book’s coolness is sometimes a risk – a few middle stretches circle the same territory of refusal so insistently that readers may feel a certain emotional starvation, a sense of being held at arm’s length by design. But that arm’s length is also the book’s integrity. McConigley is not interested in making pain palatable. She is interested in showing how palatability itself can be a form of violence.
If “How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder” falters anywhere, it is where its brilliance becomes so self-protective that it occasionally threatens to withhold the very heat that makes literature feel necessary. There are moments when the book’s procedural restraint – so admirable ethically – can verge on affective flatness, and not every reader will want to do the work the novel demands without the usual narrative rewards. But perhaps that is the point. This is a critics’ book, a syllabus book, a book that will be argued with in margins and seminar rooms. It is also, quietly, a book that understands the current moment better than many novels that wear topicality like a badge. McConigley is writing about systems that outlast headlines.
Reading it, you may find yourself wanting to ask the old questions: Was it justified? Was it necessary? Who is to blame? The novel has no interest in handing you those answers, and that refusal is part of its courage. It is not a book about moral purity. It is a book about what happens when purity is not available.
One could imagine, if one wanted to mimic the book’s own forms, a small quiz for the reader:
How do you know if you’re ready to read this novel?
A. You prefer stories that resolve.
B. You can tolerate an ending that refuses to become a lesson.
C. You believe “awareness” is the same as protection.
D. You can sit with contradiction without turning it into a verdict.
If you chose mostly A or C, the book will frustrate you. If you chose mostly B or D, it may not comfort you, but it will reward you – with the sharp, enduring reward of a novel that refuses to lie.
For all its austerity, “How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder” is a work of rare precision. It is formally inventive without being precious, politically alert without being sloganized, emotionally controlled without being inhuman. It is a book that distrusts the easy uses we try to make of suffering – the way we turn it into inspiration, content, cautionary tale, moral proving ground. McConigley’s novel declines that entire economy. It offers, instead, attention: to the ways power hides, to the ways children learn the world too soon, to the ways history lives in the body, and to the ways narrative itself can become another border patrol.
That discipline, that refusal, that intelligence – combined with the book’s willingness to be genuinely uncomfortable – is why it earns a 91 out of 100.
April 24, 2026
Haunting haunting haunting. I loved Georgie, the fierce and deeply introspective and wise young girl at the center of this narrative, and the retrospective voice of her older self searching for reclamation through the violations of her girlhood and sisterhood. The family dynamics deeply entrenched in cultural and ancestral underpinnings hit home at every level of my being. I'd just told my daughter I hadn't found a book this year that made me cry, and this one made me cry three times -- and not because the subject was difficult, but because of how gorgeously wrought the narrative, the voice, the weaving of storytelling, the talking back to colonialist/racist structures and ideas of what storytelling should be. I've already recommended this book to my best friend and given the highlighted wisdom at its center to my daughter. Even though the abuse was difficult to read about, it's so damn important that women and girls and those of us who have been abused are empowered and emboldened to speak out or sing out or scream out our stories in every way we need -- and that the shame is not heaped upon us or internalized to fester and rot within us -- but transformed as literature and art can do. Nina McConigley is a seer, a sage, and a phenomenal storyteller. I am deeply, deeply grateful to have read this book and will return to its wisdom to inspire my own work and share with students. I devoured this in one sitting this morning while I was feeling quite blue -- and now I'm ready to rest and then get back to work.
May 25, 2025
I rate this book 2/10 or 1 ⭐️. I really wanted to like this book. The cover is so cool, the writing style is totally in my lane, and the title is intriguing. Unfortunately I made it 25% in and decided to stop. I could not continue. First off, there was no indicator that there would be sexual abuse (trigger warning). Secondly, it seems like she is repetitive to some degree. It just seems like she wants everyone to KNOW, for a fact, with no doubts, that white people are racist. It kind of got old the third time. A quarter of the way in, there was no hook, no action, just confusion. Like what happened? Where in the timeline am I? Where is the point in all the rambling? Again, she is a phenomenal author, well written.
February 16, 2026
I feel very mixed about this book. There were elements i really enjoyed, like the strong, angry voice of the narration or the loose associative structure, but i also have issues. I don't think all the different components really came together and also, it was not a postcolonial murder. Like there was a murder and there were some postcolonial themes in it, but the murder had nothing to do with postcolonialism. Overall, i felt like i was reading 3 books in one, rather than one whole.
Want to Read
January 8, 2026thank you to Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage, and Anchor for access to this ARC
October 10, 2025
Georgie and Agatha just want to be normal teenage girls living in 1980s rural Wyoming, but they absolutely have to murder their creep of an uncle. But it's not actually their fault. Duh.
It's summer 1986 and while the sisters just want to watch the royal wedding and take quizzes from magazines to see "if your crush is really into you", they've made a pact that their uncle, newly arrived from India with his wife and son, needs to die. Meanwhile, the sisters contemplate life as Indian-Americans in a place where no one else is, and why the British are to blame for basically everything.
I think 80s babies will definitely get the most out of this fresh take on family drama, sisterhood, and colonialism. There's plenty of nostalgia (that sometimes went over my head as a 90s baby) as the background for this coming-of-age story that balances fun with hard-hitting topics like abuse. A really solid debut.
Thank you Pantheon for the early review copy!
It's summer 1986 and while the sisters just want to watch the royal wedding and take quizzes from magazines to see "if your crush is really into you", they've made a pact that their uncle, newly arrived from India with his wife and son, needs to die. Meanwhile, the sisters contemplate life as Indian-Americans in a place where no one else is, and why the British are to blame for basically everything.
I think 80s babies will definitely get the most out of this fresh take on family drama, sisterhood, and colonialism. There's plenty of nostalgia (that sometimes went over my head as a 90s baby) as the background for this coming-of-age story that balances fun with hard-hitting topics like abuse. A really solid debut.
Thank you Pantheon for the early review copy!
2026
May 21, 2025ANHPI TBR
📱 Thank you to NetGalley and Pantheon
📱 Thank you to NetGalley and Pantheon
May 10, 2026
4.5 stars. A dynamic novel that shakes the reader out of their comfort zone. Salient points are made in the story itself, but they also point to even deeper truths under the surface.
Early on, the narrator, weighs the justice and righteousness of her own actions, musing:
"I'm not sure you can ever cancel out someone who has taken from you, by taking more from someone else."
The many messages of the narrative, though certainly not hard to find, are expressed covertly, in a way that greatly appeals to me. I don't want the author to explain everything. Throw in an oblique reference and let the reader figure out what it means. You don't learn a lot passively; progress requires engagement.
For example, the details given about a hunter's success can be interpreted as analogous to the colonist tendency to conflate conquering with killing. Another theme in the story is that we all need someone to blame, as a kind of anchoring process, to shore up identity.
The author is crystal clear about her disdain for the exoticization of POC into folkloric constructs instead of people. POC are allowed to be angry about this. For those already experiencing cultural whiplash, this fetishization, this *othering* is unwelcome and unhelpful. On top of the ways in which generalization deprives the other of dignity, of humanity, of individuality, often there is an extra layer of performative respect, that actually centers one's self, focuses on how much praise one deserves for trying, and the effusive absolution one hopes to receive from a nameless faceless priest, representative of your monolithic people. As the narrator says:
"But you don't see. How your appreciation becomes appropriation."
Reducing a person to a paper doll cut-out and wanting credit for your reverence is misguided.
People get tired of being confined to stereotypes, being stripped of both personhood and agency. It's always those in comfortable positions of power who dictate the acceptable boundaries for others, all while making casual references to violence, safe in the knowledge that they are unlikely to ever experience any rift or breakage of the solid foundation they rest upon. How was that firm systemic structure built? Who got trampled beneath it?
What can you get away with, if you have power over someone else? The answers are ugly and evil, but also palpable and real. I was not prepared for the central crime in the story, both real, and also symbolic of a deeper rot.
Our narrator essentially answers her own question from earlier. When someone takes from you, makes you feel separated from yourself, you need to take more from them, just to return to your whole self. It's a revelation.
Philosophically, it seems that the author is honing in on the problem of humanity: the takers of the world. They take and take without providing any balance, leading to increasing levels of unrest. The fatigue is great enough to swallow everything but your anger: the one thing that can't be taken from you. And if you don't think religion can be inherently angry or confrontational, try to reword the Ten Commandments as what to do, instead of what not to do.
People say they want the truth. They don't. They want to be comfortable. Your truth discomfits them. Your truth is screaming to get out, one way or another.
Those glib ideals we hold in high regard, always end up being more complicated than we expect. Our narrator claims that there is no freedom without a fight. A corollary might be that there is no win, without a cost. Not every win feels like a celebration. Sometimes it feels like a thread you can't stop pulling, until you find you've completely unraveled. There are no easy answers here, but we cannot look away.
Early on, the narrator, weighs the justice and righteousness of her own actions, musing:
"I'm not sure you can ever cancel out someone who has taken from you, by taking more from someone else."
The many messages of the narrative, though certainly not hard to find, are expressed covertly, in a way that greatly appeals to me. I don't want the author to explain everything. Throw in an oblique reference and let the reader figure out what it means. You don't learn a lot passively; progress requires engagement.
For example, the details given about a hunter's success can be interpreted as analogous to the colonist tendency to conflate conquering with killing. Another theme in the story is that we all need someone to blame, as a kind of anchoring process, to shore up identity.
The author is crystal clear about her disdain for the exoticization of POC into folkloric constructs instead of people. POC are allowed to be angry about this. For those already experiencing cultural whiplash, this fetishization, this *othering* is unwelcome and unhelpful. On top of the ways in which generalization deprives the other of dignity, of humanity, of individuality, often there is an extra layer of performative respect, that actually centers one's self, focuses on how much praise one deserves for trying, and the effusive absolution one hopes to receive from a nameless faceless priest, representative of your monolithic people. As the narrator says:
"But you don't see. How your appreciation becomes appropriation."
Reducing a person to a paper doll cut-out and wanting credit for your reverence is misguided.
People get tired of being confined to stereotypes, being stripped of both personhood and agency. It's always those in comfortable positions of power who dictate the acceptable boundaries for others, all while making casual references to violence, safe in the knowledge that they are unlikely to ever experience any rift or breakage of the solid foundation they rest upon. How was that firm systemic structure built? Who got trampled beneath it?
What can you get away with, if you have power over someone else? The answers are ugly and evil, but also palpable and real. I was not prepared for the central crime in the story, both real, and also symbolic of a deeper rot.
Our narrator essentially answers her own question from earlier. When someone takes from you, makes you feel separated from yourself, you need to take more from them, just to return to your whole self. It's a revelation.
Philosophically, it seems that the author is honing in on the problem of humanity: the takers of the world. They take and take without providing any balance, leading to increasing levels of unrest. The fatigue is great enough to swallow everything but your anger: the one thing that can't be taken from you. And if you don't think religion can be inherently angry or confrontational, try to reword the Ten Commandments as what to do, instead of what not to do.
People say they want the truth. They don't. They want to be comfortable. Your truth discomfits them. Your truth is screaming to get out, one way or another.
Those glib ideals we hold in high regard, always end up being more complicated than we expect. Our narrator claims that there is no freedom without a fight. A corollary might be that there is no win, without a cost. Not every win feels like a celebration. Sometimes it feels like a thread you can't stop pulling, until you find you've completely unraveled. There are no easy answers here, but we cannot look away.
March 1, 2026
Thanks to NetGalley and Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage, and Anchor for the ARC. It hasn't affected the contents of my review.
For such a small book, this took me forever to read. This is lit-fic crime novella about two sisters of Indian immigrants who murder their uncle. But that's not what the story is about, at least in the way of usual crime stories. Our narrator is one of the sisters, and she has to explain all about her life, and all about being Indian in a majority white country, and about her family, and her opinions, and the result of all of this is that the story is 90% musings and 10% Vinny Uncle being a shit and getting his comeuppance.
This is a story I admire and enjoy thinking critically about, but which I did not enjoy reading. It was an intellectual exercise, and I much prefer to sink into a book and forget I exist.
If you like this kind of book, I would highly recommend.
[3.5 stars]
CW:
For such a small book, this took me forever to read. This is lit-fic crime novella about two sisters of Indian immigrants who murder their uncle. But that's not what the story is about, at least in the way of usual crime stories. Our narrator is one of the sisters, and she has to explain all about her life, and all about being Indian in a majority white country, and about her family, and her opinions, and the result of all of this is that the story is 90% musings and 10% Vinny Uncle being a shit and getting his comeuppance.
This is a story I admire and enjoy thinking critically about, but which I did not enjoy reading. It was an intellectual exercise, and I much prefer to sink into a book and forget I exist.
If you like this kind of book, I would highly recommend.
[3.5 stars]
CW:
Displaying 1 - 30 of 1,211 reviews