Your Heart Is a Muscle the Size of a Fist

by Sunil Yapa

The Flamethrowers meets Let the Great World Spin in this debut novel set amid the heated conflict of Seattle's 1999 WTO protests.

On a rainy, cold day in November, young Victor--a boyish, scrappy world traveler who's run away from home--sets out to sell marijuana to the 50,000 anti-globalization protestors gathered in the streets. It quickly becomes clear that the throng determined to shut the city down--from environmentalists to teamsters to anarchists--are testing the patience of the police, and what started as a peaceful protest is threatening to erupt into violence.

Over the course of one life-altering afternoon, the lives of seven people will change forever: foremost among them police chief Bishop, the estranged father Victor hasn't seen in three years, two protestors struggling to stay true to their non-violent principles as the day descends into chaos, two police officers in the street, and the coolly elegant financial minister from Sri Lanka whose life, as well as his country's fate, hinges on getting through the angry crowd, out of jail, and to his meeting with the president of the United States.

In this raw and breathtaking novel, Yapa marries a deep rage with a deep humanity, and in doing so casts an unflinching eye on the nature and limits of compassion.

Genres: Fiction, Historical Fiction, Book Club, Literary Fiction, Politics, Contemporary, Novels

314 pages, Hardcover

First published January 12, 2016

About the author

Sunil Yapa holds a BA in economic geography from Penn State University, and received his MFA in Fiction from Hunter College in New York City in 2010, where he worked with two-time Booker Prize winning author Peter Carey, and the 2009 National Book Award winner (Let the Great World Spin) Colum McCann. While at Hunter Sunil was also awarded the Alumni Scholarship & Welfare Fund Fellowship, which is given to one fiction student every three years, and was twice selected as a Hertog Fellow, working as a research assistant for Zadie Smith (Changing My Mind), as well as Ben Marcus (The Flame Alphabet).
He is the recipient of the 2010 Asian American Short Story Award, sponsored by Hyphen Magazine and the Asian American Writers’ Workshop in New York, and has received scholarships to The New York State Summer Writers’ Institute, The Norman Mailer Writers’ Center in Provincetown and The Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. His writing has appeared in American Short Fiction, The Margins, Hyphen Magazine, The Tottenville Review, Pindeldyboz: Stories that Defy Classification, and others.
The biracial son of a Sri Lankan father and a mother from Montana, Yapa has lived around the world, including time living in Greece, Guatemala, Chile, Argentina, China, and India, as well as, London, Montreal, and New York City.

Reviews

[Will Byrnes · Rating 5 out of 5]

...the days of community policing were over. The world was a bottleful of sparkling darkness and the cops were charged with keeping the cork in it while the rich shook and shook.

The contradiction inherent in the title is realized in Your Heart is a Muscle the Size of a Fist as Sunil Yapa, in his remarkable first novel, brings us inside the 1999 anti-WTO protests that rocked Seattle. Over the course of a single day the seven main characters struggle with rage and love, alienation and connection, honor and shame, sacrifice and safety.


Sunil Yapa - from NPR

Victor is a mixed race 19-year-old, back in his hometown after several years tramping through the world. He wanders out one morning, looking to sell a bit of weed, when he stumbles into a small gathering of 50,000.

Timothy Park is a cop with major scarring on his face, and anger management issues. Julia is his partner, born in Guatemala, and formerly a cop in Los Angeles. She has some issues of her own.

John Henry is a militantly peaceful protest organizer, challenged to maintain his cool when the local constabulary start going all Rodney King on the protesters. The mononymous Kingfisher, better known as King, despite her gender, shares Henry’s commitment to protecting the environment, but has crossed a line or two in doing that, and, her heart far from immaculate, is constantly disturbed by the murmur of a large secret.

Dr. Charles Wickramsinghe is a Sri Lankan minister, eager to meet with President Clinton, expecting that the WTO meeting will usher Sri Lanka into the worldwide economy, and pump up living standards for his countrymen. He runs into a bit of a problem, though, when he gets caught in the crowd of demonstrators and is treated by the cops as they are treating the locals.


WTO Go To Hell - this and subsequent images from the demo are taken from the Seattle Post Intelligencer

Police Chief William Bishop is under high pressure from the Mayor to make sure the delegates can get to the WTO conference. He had been expecting a much smaller, more manageable crowd. He had done a poor job taking the pulse of the gathering and is now overwhelmed and pushed into a corner. Nine hundred cops are clearly not sufficient to manage a multitude of such dimensions. He would very much prefer to be the good cop in this scenario, using persuasion and negotiation with the protesters to reach mutually agreeable accommodation, find a safety valve, keep things flowing, avoiding a large arrest scenario, but he really has to unclog several intersections and keep crucial arteries clear, whether with words or other means. He keeps a keen eye out, hoping to see his son, the one he had raised as his own ever since marrying the boy’s mother, the one who had fled three years ago after his mother died, the one who is now living in a tent under a highway overpass, Victor.


Do Not Block Intersection - showing the sort of vehicle Park and Julia were on

There are two main elements at work here. One is a look at a place and time in history, a vision that considers politics, economics, race, and gender, the novel’s informational payload. The other, at the heart of the book, is the range of emotional journeys that Yapa’s characters undergo. All have depth, history, internal contradictions and drives. No one emerges unchanged.

1999, on the cusp of the millennium, was a time when disparities in income, working conditions, and environmental protections between the first and third worlds were gaining some attention, a time before 9/11, when the powers that be would take advantage to portray all dissent as treason. A movement was bubbling up and would spill over in subsequent demonstrations in other cities. It was certainly not the first time armed police had attacked unarmed civilians. That has been happening for as long as there have been police. But capital was circulating in new ways. The corporations of the world wanted the freedom to move their investments anywhere on the planet with as little resistance as possible. They wanted to move jobs that had been filled by Westerners, you now, those pesky unionized sorts, with actual rights and expectations, to places where the pay scale was a fraction of what it was in the West, and where they did not have to put up with all those sclerotic-seeming environmental and safety regulations. Not that there was a shortage of companies in North America and Europe more than willing to ignore the rules and pollute at will, externalizing the cost of cleanup onto exploited communities, while evading taxes on their profits, but they could make even more money by taking their production facilities to more pliable states. This was what the demonstrations were about, not opposition to global trade, but opposition to the sort of exploitative trade that was becoming more and more the standard. Sure, we’ll bring our businesses to your impoverished country, but first we have some conditions. The demonstrators got what the game was and were voicing their objections.

Some say the heart is just like a wheel, when you bend it, you can’t mend it. - from a well known song by Anna McGarrigle

Several of the seven main characters are trying to fix that dented rim. Bishop has suffered the heartbreak of loss, and wants his son to learn that attachment, that caring leads to crushing disappointment. Victor is trying to fill the void left by the loss of his mother and his falling out with Bishop. King, who has become a cop-whisperer at such gatherings, who sees herself as someone “with only love in her heart,” has blackened that heart with a terrible act, and carries the guilt with her every day. And what if the goodness of the human heart was not assured?

King knew she would remember, drifting toward sleep some day far removed, the solid thump the wood made falling upon him. It was the sound of the true heartbeat of the world, and once it had been heard, there was no way to stop hearing it. Thump-thump. Thump-thump. And what was it in that long and prolonged instant—what was it that told her this pain would go on forever? What was happening there was no erasing. There would be no apologies, no forgetting, no reconciliations. Just the opening to the pain that is your friend dead or shot or starved or beaten. Disappeared into the place where the disappeared die. She saw six cops standing over him and there was something in the way their fists rose and fell that made her heart want to stop. Like a clock that had run out of time.

John Henry leads and endures in the turmoil of the protest - they would not stop until they had accomplished what their hearts had demanded they do. Wikramsinghe’s heart is with his countrymen, but he must guard it in the rough and tumble of negotiations.


And the meek shall inherit the pepper spray

And each of the characters, in his or her own way, and whether or not they are taken over by lower impulses, is trying, not just to repair their own hurts, but to do the right thing for the world outside themselves.

Bishop is trying to clear the intersections without anyone getting hurt, and desperately hoping to find a way back into his son’s life. Park and Julia are, mostly, following orders in service of the street-clearing goal, but contend with their own internal demands and impulses. John Henry, Julia and then Victor are each doing their part to try to shut down the WTO meetings, non-violently. Dr. Wickramsinghe is trying to get the best possible deal for his country. No cartoon baddies here. The characters are held up side by side. Julia and King, for example are both very tough young women, each with a strong moral sense, each with guilt, each faced with challenges to their sense of right and wrong. John Henry and Park both endured hardships that tested their character. We see how each responds to the challenge of the demonstration.


The Seattle Gasworks

At a recent book tour event Yapa called this a “father-son story.” And it is indeed that. The pain Bishop experiences at the loss of his son, the loneliness, the absence rivals the struggle that Victor goes through trying to fill the emptiness he feels. Their relationship not only permeates the novel, it braces it. The heart wants what the heart wants, even if the heart is not always able to articulate what that might be, even if it may not know how to go about filling its needs, even if it is not quite sure what those needs are.

I was reminded of the TV series Sense8, (a bloody amazing TV show) not for the woo-woo element, but for the skillful weaving together of the individual stories into a coherent whole, a portrait of a time and place, a consideration of real emotion as connecting tissue among the (mostly) well-realized characters. That is a show that rises above the rest. There is some exquisite writing in this book, poetic, exultant, and insightful that lifts it above the crowd as well.

The Heart is a Muscle the Size of a Fist will give your ticker a workout, in opening your heart to these characters, and in fanning the flames of rage at how dark some hearts can be. You will learn something about what it is like to be on both sides of such large confrontations, maybe pick up a little about the vagaries of international trade and power relationships. But mostly you will get to see and feel how the mayhem of that day is experienced by each of these seven characters, and maybe join them in considering some larger questions as well. Heartily recommended.


Review First Posted – 2/12/2016

Published – 1/12/2016

=============================EXTRA STUFF

Links to the author’s personal, Twitter, Instagram, and FB pages

The author’s piece for LitHub.com on HOW TO LIVE CHEAPLY AND FINISH YOUR NOVEL - SUNIL YAPA'S THREE RULES FOR THE WRITING LIFE, in which he tells about losing the entire and sole copy of the novel. Oops. Yep. Yapa had to rewrite the entire novel from scratch. Now, that’s determination.

Interviews
-----video - Late Night with Seth Meyers - part 1 - availability will expire 1/13/17
-----Part 2 of the interview - availability will expire 1/13/17

Awards
-----Amazon Spotlight Pick January 2016
-----Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers Winter '16
-----Indies Introduce Pick Winter '16
-----Indie Next Pick Jan '16

Items about the WTO demonstrations
----- 30 Frames a Second: The WTO in Seattle is a fascinating documentary about the Battle in Seattle by Rustin Thompson
-----An excellent history of events from the Seattle Post Intelligencer
----- A nice piece that pulls together all the issues involved - WTO Protests in Seattle, 1999- from GlobalIssues.org- by Anup Shah
----- The Dark Side of Globalization: Why Seattle's 1999 Protesters Were Right : The WTO demonstrators were the "Occupy" movement of the late-20th century—mocked, maligned, and mostly right – by Noah Smith - from The Atlantic, January 6, 2014

Music
-----In the text of the review, I included a link to the Linda Ronstadt version of the song Heart Like a Wheel. Here is a link to the original, performed by Kate and Anna McGarrigle
-----Here is a link to the lyrics of the song Your Heart is a Muscle the Size of Your Fist, which I imagine figured into the naming of this book
-----And a link to a performance of the song by its makers, Ramshackle Glory- an anarcho-punk band with many members, based in Tucson, AZ.

[Elyse Walters · Rating 4 out of 5]

"He traveled because he knew he did not belong. The home where he had been born was not his home. Something was missing. From him or from his home, he didn't know, and so he wandered.

Victor, with brown skin, had been on the road for three years. He left home at age 16. He circled the globe, east to west, north to south. He grew a beard and lost weight. He ran out of money. He took on odd jobs. His mother, Suzanne had died. He was heartbroken and lonely for her. His step father, Chief Bishop, - a white man - who had been in Victor's life for eight years -loved him.... worried that Victor cared TOO MUCH ABOUT THE WORLDS PROBLEMS-- and he would get hurt by it.
One night Chief Bishop's anger got the best of him with Victor-- an abusive episode hurting Victor -- sent Victor out the door. The Bishop never reported him missing- for he would have had to expose the fact that he dislocated the boy's shoulder. Until that night -- Victor had only thought of Chief Bishop as 'daddy'.... never a stepfather.

Sharing about Victor and his stepfather, Chief Bishop, only begins to skim the surface of this story. --- ONLY THE SURFACE.....

Author Sunil Yapa sets this story during the Seattle World Trade Organization protests of 1999. Tens of thousands of protesters-- and around 900 cops on posts ready to protect their city. Victor is back home too - trying to sell weed to the protesters.

A delegate, Dr. Charles Wickramsinghe, from Sri Lanka is trying to get to a meeting -pushing through the crowds - being blocked ....
There is a powerful scene in the book when Dr. Charles looks at what makes America America....
not that they felt guilty about their privilege, not that they felt compassion for mistreated workers three continents away, .... no, Americans felt they had the POWER to do something.
Dr. Charles "felt sudden queasy sadness, what if they knew what a real revolutionary
was?"

What made this book good for me -- was looking at the protests from every angle. It felt real - not pleasant- but real.

A thinking man's book.... captivating....and currently relevant!!!!

[Diane S ☔ · Rating 4 out of 5]

In this powerfully written novel Yapa takes the reader into the heart of the WTO protests of the 1999 held in Seattle. I remember watching scenes of this on the news, wondering how this could be happening, wondering why. This book takes a more personal slant by introducing us to a few different characters from all sides. Throughout the long day, as things spiral out of control we will learn their stories and what led them to converge in this time and place.

Hard to read at times, the brutality is graphic but really happened so necessary to the story to show just how quickly things got out of hand. Also learned much about how unfair the fair trade agreements actually are, never benefiting those who need it the most. The author did a stellar job showing us all the different sides, what their actions were, and how complete mayhem ensued despite everyone previous intentions to keep this non violent. Whether this was true or not it did show how this was possible, how in such a short time people, normal people could act so against
who they were to descend to the level that made this possible.

A very well done portrayal of a situation and characters of a time and place. A brilliant first novel to boot.

ARC from publisher.

[Peter Boyle · Rating 2 out of 5]

It's difficult to spin a convincing narrative around a single incident from multiple perspectives. You need to keep the overarching story motoring while ensuring your characters are distinct and compelling, and find a natural way to segue from one viewpoint to the next. I thought Ryan Gattis did an excellent job of this recently with the electric All Involved. I'm not so sure Sunil Yapa pulls it off here.

The backdrop is the 1999 "Battle of Seattle", where activists clashed violently with police during a WTO conference. The plot is recounted from the voices of seven different characters on both sides of the conflict. The tension mounts early on, where the determination of the protesters comes to light and it quickly becomes clear how unprepared the police are. It's not long before all hell breaks loose, and Yapa is good at evoking the chaos which ensued.

The problem is I didn't find any of the characters particularly likable or interesting. Victor, the police chief's son is so unbelievably earnest. We're talking about a 19-year old boy who ran away from home after his father burnt some precious books belonging to his late mother. Now he has returned with eyes opened after travelling the world and feels like he has it all figured out. He questions the motivations of these well-dressed, educated activists when he has seen so much poverty and hardship on his journey to enlightenment and then joins the protest seemingly on a whim. A lot of the cast make similar ill-fitted, knee-jerk reactions like this.

The rest of the characters are similarly uninspiring. The two cops are hard-edged but with thoughtful, caring centres. Yawn. They both have conveniently important back-stories - one was a hero of the Oklahoma bombings, the other an early responder to the Rodney King riots. The two main protesters are cardboard cut-outs - an attempt is made to make one of them more engaging by describing her involvement in a murder some years earlier but this sub-plot goes nowhere. Then there's the Sri Lankan politician who is in Seattle for trade negotiations - he has a baffling encounter with an actress on a flight which is never explained.

The tone of the book bothered me too; it's quite sanctimonious at times. I also felt like I was attending an economics lecture at certain points. Yapa is not without talent - his descriptions of the actual conflict are visceral and gripping. But without characters to root for and care about, it all feels a bit futile.

[Ron Charles · Rating 4 out of 5]

The new year explodes with a fantastic debut novel called “Your Heart Is a Muscle the Size of a Fist.” Sunil Yapa, the 38-year-old author, sets his story amid the melee of the Seattle WTO protests in 1999. Indelible coverage of that disaster and all the videos of police brutality around the country since then may have withered our capacity to be shocked, but Yapa’s ­re-creation of those horrible hours in the Emerald City arrives like a punch in the chest.

Think back to that innocent age before Sept. 11, 2001. On the eve of the millennium,the World Trade Organization Ministerial Conference gathered to usher in a century of expanded economic development. More than 130 countries sent delegates to Seattle; U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan and President Bill Clinton were scheduled to bask in the glow of international cooperation. But those hopes were incinerated before. . . .

To read the rest of this review, go to The Washington Post:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/entert...

[Ioana · Rating 3 out of 5]

1999 WTO protests.
People around the world live in abject poverty. The mentally ill are out on the streets. Children are starving. Big Pharma is creating monopolies of health. American corn subsidies are impoverishing agricultural nations. The US is shoving hormone treated beef down the throats of unwilling Europeans, under the guise of 'free trade'. Workers are being exploited. Terrible injustice permeates human existence.

But, there is hope: "He heard them saying in the streets, 'Another world is possible,' and beneath his ribs broken and healed and twice broken and healed and thrice broken and healed, he shuddered and thought, God help us. We are mad with hope. Here we come." And, for those who come together in such displays of hopeful protest, their collective action and standing together is how "they hold the fear in their mouths and transform it into gold"...

Ah, sweet, positive, forward-looking perspective.

This book would have kindled a fierce will-to-action in my 20-year old starry-eyed bleeding-heart liberal optimistic soul. But now, as a 30s something fully disillusioned adult, what strikes me most about Yapa's message is its seemingly youthful naivete, its... untarnished romanticism. Even violence is presented as redeemable, ultimately conquerable. Everywhere, there is hope!

I totally fell for that in 2008 and 2012. I used to be a most hopeless romantic. So perhaps this means that instead of focusing on why this book induced some major bouts of eye-rolling, I should instead ask, What HAPPENED to me?!?! Have I completed the full transformation into my Romanian-strength cynical parents?

To be fair, Yapa's own understanding is much more nuanced than what I've let on so far. He does allude to protester's optimism as a quintessential American phenomenon, born in positions of privilege and sustained through the (white) "savior complex". Also, a Sri Lankan representative to the WTO meetings is invoked as part of the supporting cast, an offering of a perspective from the 'outside'. But, he is but a bit-player, an interlude to the action. And, in the end, this is not a story about the plight of colonized people, but one about "hope" - hope in our power to change 'the system' and to sustain each other, hope in the potency of protest and collective action, hope in our ability to 'make a difference', and so on and the like.

Ok, so by now it's clear I'm fully a-romantic. I do believe in beauty/love/ideals/dreams, but I remain grounded as a first principle. Nothing really gets under my skin as the reek of explicit sappiness. And, while Yapa's words resonate deeply with the plight of being human, there are too many instances of this for my taste:

"The man who took her hand in his, not an effort of restraint, but holding her hand and looking into her face, and in his eyes she saw not the state, not institutionalized evil, not modern medicine and all its chemical compromises, not the death of human connection, not a servant of the state which built prisons for you at every turn, no, what she saw in his eyes, in his face, was nothing more than simple human concern, the sudden affection of one human being for another."

Yes, yes, it's all absolutely true, and beautifully written even, and I get it, but I do appreciate subtlety, and I'm not a fan of emotionally-manipulative writing. Especially when such writing depicts worlds I'm already in agreement with, that I already inhabit. I absolutely 100% agree with Yapa - YES workers are exploited, YES the era of agriculture that Monsanto is ushering in will be the death of us, YES big pharama's profiteering ways are the moral equivalent of experimentation on the less fortunate, YES of course cops are just people and we all have a potential to connect on a human level. But there's just something about this kind of open polemicism, even (especially) from my own 'side' of the political spectrum, that I do not digest well. Yapa doesn't rant, but he sure does pontificate. And explain. And muse, in detail. And then articulate some more.

One last praise/complaint: Yapa's writing.
A demonstration will serve. Staccato thoughts. Just scattered associations, really. Mostly, not sentences. At least, at first, and then after a bit of this, words begin to cohere into nebulous forms. Next, a full one presents: here is a subject, a predicate, and we are once again on solid ground. And then there may even come a truly beautiful and poignant sentence that vividly depicts some soul-wrenching order of the universe. Until the cycle degenerates into a stream of uninterrupted musings on global trade and the effects of colonization and did you know we are exploiting immigrant workers, they work on farms and don't get paid enough and we must protest because this is not even a sentence anymore but who cares because love and hope trump violence and despair and the tyranny of fiction, and we will persevere while making our own meaning as we tumble through all this feeling.
[Repeat for 300 pages]

This is Yapa's debut, and it gives every indication that he has the ear, the heart, and the lyricism to write glorious poetry. But at the moment, his poeticism seems a bit contrived; I probably could develop an algorithm that could gobble up the first few chapters and predict to the note the flow for the remainder of the book: staccato - phrases - full sentences - stream of consciousness - loop back. The style is especially jarring considering chapters alternate perspectives - a cop, a chief of police, various protesters, the guy from Sri Lanka. And yet they all think/talk the same way.

Overall, though, I'm glad I read this - it's been popping up on so many lists, curiosity was overwhelming me, and now I know. Also, OK, OK I agree with it all! And it's beautiful and if I had read this when I was 20, I would have fallen in love...

Disclaimer: Your Heart is a Muscle could very well be a 5-star-book, seeing as this review reflects more on my cynicism than on any other factor.

[Rebecca · Rating 4 out of 5]

The heart or the fist, which will it be? A hard-hitting novel with an unforgettably resonant title, this is set at the 1999 Seattle WTO protest. Yapa explores the motivations and backstories of activists, police officers, and delegates as the day deteriorates into violence. King was my favorite character, but they’re all well drawn. I particularly enjoyed the asides about Dr. Charles Wickramsinghe, would-be WTO representative from Sri Lanka; the scene where he sits down with arrested protestors and asks about their objections is among the best.

Yapa is half Sri Lankan, and his observations about race and class in America vs. the developing world are acute. The novel flows pretty much effortlessly – luckily, its original length has been cut by 50% (he lost that version when his laptop was stolen), so there’s no danger of it becoming another City on Fire. His writing style is closest to Smith Henderson’s (Fourth of July Creek): short, verbless sentences alternate with long, lyrical ones; there���s plenty of repetition and rhetorical questions, but it remains accessible rather than overblown.

The necessary numbness, the cold core of watchfulness, and the problem of remaining a person yourself, a person who cares. A person who feels. A person who does not hate.

This fine debut novel is about cultivating the natural compassion in your heart even while under the threat of the fist.

[Book Riot Community]

Man, this book is possibly the most suspenseful character study I’ve ever read. Taking place over the course of one day during the World Trade Organization protest in 1999, this compressed narrative is an absolute gut-punch. I read it in two sittings, 150 pages each and was both in awe of the lyrical and sparse descriptions and the knot in my stomach, not knowing how it was going to all come together. The chapter narration switches among seven characters, and each person is a unique, beautiful, complicated person and it’s not clear until the end how each of them fully impacts the others, if they do at all. In light of the protests and resistance against our current political climate, this is more timely than Yapa probably intended, but it is a worthy and necessary read.

–Rachel Manwill


from The Best Books We Read In January 2017: http://bookriot.com/2017/02/01/riot-r...

[Holly · Rating 1 out of 5]

Overwrought, melodramatic, and overwritten. I didn't care for the writing, the characterization, the handling of the facts, or the muddled politics. Notes:

The writing
I hated the lyrical prose. Many sentences are utter nonsense or just overwritten. The female cop, "Ju" - her "philosophy" of policing? It makes no sense at all. Is King from western Pennsylvania's coal-mining country or a "New York City girl, a Brooklyn transplant?" Chanting protestors are described as "A thousand voices joined in rhythm, It was a primal, sound, a roar like a waterfall, a thousand voices becoming for the briefest of moments one voice, one roar, threaded through with frustration and yearning, their desperation to break through to another plane." And "a choir composed of a thousand trembling voices rising and humming." [I was there Nov. 30, 1999 and what I heard were voices all talking at once, and drums.]

The characters
I think Yapa overloaded his seven characters with too many traits. They were embodied stereotypes: the rogue cop, the good cop, the hardbitten police chief, the punk kid, the hippie chick, the peaceful preacher-type, etc.- but they were also walking contradictions, amalgamations of disparate character traits. E.g.,
Victor: a drifting, disaffected, potdealing teenager who we're told once read his mother's copies of Freire and Fanon, but mocks the message of anti-globalization activists ("fuck them"). Then turns on a dime and joins the protests - not because he shares or appreciates their message but because he is a convenient body. On one page he is "absolutely allergic to belief" - then, inexplicably:"[He] envied John Henry his belief. He wanted to believe in something. Wanted to get pulled down into it, absorbed and lost in the rhythm of the words."
(This 16-year-old African American runaway is also a seasoned and jaded solo world traveler. He wanders alone though all of Central and South America, India, China, and Tibet and become a convenient-for-the novel witness to the poverty and injustice of the Global South? - How did he scrape together plane fare every six months or so? He did manual labor and picked lettuce.)

Chief Bishop: tough-as-nails middle-aged cop who climbs Mount Rainier in his off time, marches in the gay pride parade, marries an African American hippie intellectual, and just happens to be Victor's estranged father. He destroys books out of anger, attacks law-abiding protesters, has absolutely no understanding of nonviolent direct action, and has but three thought refrains("I miss my son" and "the world is a cruel place" and "it's my city, it's my city!"). But on another page:
"This was a man whose opinion was not influenced by the mob, a man familiar, it seemed, with the darker corners of the human soul, and man capable of both fairness and forgiveness." ???

Kingfisher (King): a career activist trained in the tactics and philosophy of nonviolence, who becomes so self-absorbed that she inexplicably picks up an anarchist's crowbar to vandalize a bank window. Then she walks away and minutes later: "She would not let her rage overcome her. Neither her despair. She would not meet violence with violence. She believed in the transcendent power of love ..." (gag)

Officer Park - a violent, mean, vengeful, ignorant sexist, but an Oklahoma City bombing hero, so: good heart?
Officer "Ju" - she has "lived through the LA riots" and constantly reassures herself of her chops as a police officer, but when faced with nonviolent anti-globalization activists she loses all composure. Kingfisher runs toward Ju and Ju shoots her in the shoulder with a real gun. Oops.

The protestors: stereotypes.
Chief Bishop has the sense that the amassing crowds were threatening to "overwhelm his city." Yapa repeatedly allows this impression to dominate, even if it's the Chief's and it's wrong. Some of them had simple reasons and some had nuanced thoughtfully considered motivations for wanting to stop the WTO meetings.
The protestors as "children":The Sri Lankan delegate refers to them as privileged "children" who don't understand the problems of the developing world. (that was patronizing).
The Police Chief: These were children who put their bodies in the street [...] and waited for the cops to come - his cops with their batons and their tear gas and their pepper spray." - Actually, no!

The anarchists - the actual violent troublemakers
Yapa calls them "black-hooded monks." That's a little too respectful, isn't it? There are a couple of uses of the word "anarchist": -the police hear reports of them over their radios. This may be Yapa's attempt to convey something that did happen: anarchists did break windows and vandalize - but the police did not stop them, didn't make arrests, and focused on the nonviolent protesters in larger numbers. (Almost as if they condoned some vandalism in order to have reason to go after all the protestors. This gave the entire direct action the mistaken reputation of violence.) If Yapa was trying to subtly convey that the police intentionally ignored the anarchists, then it was probably lost on many readers. Yapa overexplains and repeats just about everything else, but not this point.

The timing
It's morning when we first meet King, so why is she wearing a gas mask? Yapa has the violence and mayhem start too early in the day. Yapa has combined events of several days and nights. The real timeline was more interesting.

The politics
The novel is largely devoid of political explication, save for a a brief scene wherein arrested activists explain to the Sri Lankan delegate why they object to the WTO. [- This brings up one interesting angle briefly explored - the complicated reasons a Third World/developing world country would want to be in the WTO. And the sacrifices they'd need to make and the double-bind they'd find themselves in if allowed admission. But there was really no discussion of globalization or of what the delegates were even there to discuss.] And related:

The self-centeredness
Every character has completely selfish motivations for their actions and self-centered thoughts. E.g., Victor's tear-gas canisters "tumbling out of the sky with a message meant just for him;" the police chief constantly affronted by the "takeover" of "his city", King's myopic act of frustration-motivated vandalism; etc etc. I understand that it's supposed to be character-driven fiction, but how true is that? I hope and believe that some of us can put aside our own selves for periods when the common good is at stake and when a cause larger than ourselves is being debated.

[Erin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Seattle 1999.
Rarely do I read books that talk about events that happened in my lifetime, but this afternoon I cracked the spine of a new book purchase and found myself looking through many different pairs of eyes during the events of the Seattle protests as the World Trade Organization (WTO) prepares to meet.
He heard them in the streets saying, "Another world is possible," and beneath his ribs broken and healed and twice broken and healed and thrice broken and healed, he shuddered and thought, God help us. We are mad with hope. Here we come.
Only covering a few hours, I appreciated the opportunity to receive an understanding of what motivates the protesters, the WTO, and the police. Because it's 19 years later, we get the opportunity as readers to see how quickly nonviolence became something explosive.

[Carol - Reading Writing and Riesling · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have never read anything so violent or dark...I know clearly why I prefer crime fiction to these agonising truths.

My View:
This is not a book for the faint hearted or for those who feel deeply. I feel too deeply, I don’t think this was a book for me. Several times I started reading this and then the extreme, up close, in your face level of violence made me stop. Violence committed by a few, whose individual actions spurred “pack rage,” and more senseless violence (and this is by the “peacekeepers, the trained professional upholders of the law) against a peaceful, (to a point) sea of protestors. To me this was about rage buried deep, personal rage and alienation finally given an opportunity to be spewed out on the streets as violence against the unarmed. Damaged individuals in control, who vets our peacekeepers? Who take responsibility?

This narrative was not cleansing or healing. It is politics – domestic and international, at its grimy worst, exposed. For me the back story of the father/son relationship was not strong enough to uplift the overall voice of violence. The character, the Sri Lankan delegate, did show some realistic optimism – when his eyes were opened he could finally see the power he and the other smaller nations united, did hold.

I am gratefully to be appraised of a time, a situation that had till now had somehow escaped my attention. The distance between my world and these lives on the page has been narrowed, thank you. However I cannot do anything but shake my head in disbelief at the savage way we treat our fellow human beings. This is not a book for me…but it is powerfully, almost savagely written and these words and feelings will stay with me a while yet. An emotional and powerful debut.

[Monica · Rating 3 out of 5]

I can tell that Yapa has an MFA. It comes across in the writing. There are beautiful descriptive passages. The language is florid and sometimes breathtaking. There is a rhythm that comes across as trained or methodical. In fact, by the end of the book I began to view it as experimental or an assignment. Intriguing premise. A few hours inside the WTO demonstrations back in the 90s. The entire novel took place in the space of about 5 hours with multiple characters and points of view and flashbacks to highlight their state of mind. This was an earnest and ambitious novel. It is evident that Yapa was reaching for a meaningful book. A book that explains the suffering associated with the trade policies specifically US but definitely included other "first world" or large nations or blocks representing enormous economic power within the world. Yapa shows flashes of brilliance and when he's on, he's powerful:

"American bodies no longer on the line. No longer employed in the so-called manufacturing sector. American bodies too expensive for work so they find cheaper bodies to feed the machine."

and

"What a violence of the spirit to not know the world."

But when he's off…oh boy

"And yet there he was, his son, looking and smiling through his half-opened eyes, not a look of concern, but as if he understood in some way, the sometime knowledge of what this is, the knowledge of the whole ugly beautiful thing, the knowledge of the courage it takes to move into fear and to fuck up and to go on living, knowing that sometimes it is two people alone and some small kindness between them that is not even called family, or forgiveness, but might be what some, on the good days, call love."

That ladies and gentlemen was a single sentence. No, I'm not a grammar cop. To me it demonstrates Yapa's desire to be profound and insightful and (in my view) it falls short.

All in all it's a good novel. It was interesting and though told from multiple points of view, there was enough variation in the voices that the characters remained separate and unique. The WTO meeting in Seattle was an interesting plot and important, often misunderstood. After reading the book I do know a little more about it than I did before (which was nothing). I think it's a worthwhile spotlight. It's a good debut. I rounded down because towards the end, it was getting tedious and when I can't wait to finish in the midst of a human rights demonstration where both the cops and the protesters are showcased, there's something not quite right. Also too, I really didn't learn that much…

3.5ish Stars rounded down

Read on kindle

[Linda · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.99 on 01/07/17

A chilling, powerful, beautiful debut novel by Sunil Yapa.
This is the fictional account of what may have happened on the streets of Seattle in 1999. The WTO came to host the Ministerial Conference which was to be "peacefully" protested. The story is seen through the eyes of 7 different characters. I thought Yapa did an excellent job of communicating the perspective of each character with the reader.

Another place, another time, jarringly real with today's new reason for social civil war. This one gripped me in the gut! I felt nauseous, anger, despair, I wept. Powerful!!

I wasn't sure when I purchased it, but for 2.99 what did I have to lose? It will be one of the most powerful, thought provoking books of 2017 for me.

[Taryn · Rating 5 out of 5]

I didn’t expect to like this book. To begin with, I knew nothing about the 1999 WTO protest in Seattle around which the novel centers. (Literally, nothing. As in, I can’t believe I was alive when this happened, because I have never heard of it ever in my life.) Then came an unflattering-bordering-on-mean review from NPR, and I was regretting placing my library hold. However, I decided to give debut author Sunil Yapa a grudging 50 pages to impress me. I promised myself I could stop after those 50 pages if I wasn’t sold.

Then I finished it in two days.

You can trust NPR as an objective news source, but when it comes to taste in books and movies, those granola-chomping hippies don’t know what they’re freaking talking about. Because this book is GREAT. The only reason it might not be on every single Best of 2016 list is because it was published in the second week of January, and book critics aren’t famous for their long memories.

The prose is gorgeous. Rhythmic, lush, mesmerizing. Yapa’s style helps to create meaning instead of fighting against it—something I’ve seen too rarely lately in my literary fiction reading. And the wide-ranging cast of characters—each fully realized, despite their number. Suspenseful—gut-wrenching—redemptive—I realize I’m just blurting single words now.

Just read it, please. See if you can stop after 50 pages.

More book recommendations by me at www.readingwithhippos.com

[Jaclyn · Rating 3 out of 5]

The first half of this book is a hot mess. Character development is all over the place and so many things happen that I just could not believe. A 19-year-old homeless drug dealer would not leave his backpack full of drugs (his way out) in a dumpster. He just wouldn't. Nope. He also wouldn't join the protesters as quickly as he does. Nope. It's rushed and weird and all over the place. I kind of hated it. This review perfectly captures how I feel about the first half of this book: http://www.npr.org/2016/01/12/4622632...

BUT

The second half of this book is completely SPECTACULAR! The politics of it as well as the prose is wonderful. Oh how I wish this book was more even. It reminds me why I never give up on a book because you just never know!

SO

I can't recommend it fully (a book needs to be more than its second half) and I would instead direct you to Ryan Gattis's perfect All Involved (about the LA riots, but similar in many ways, just you know, better).

[Melanie · Rating 2 out of 5]

I would round this up to 2.5 if possible. (OK bordering on good). I have been trying to decide for a while now how to rate this. While the story itself was interesting (I don't remember hearing about the true events this book is based on) I did not like the style in which it was written There are multiple viewpoints, which is fine by me but I didn't like that from paragraph to paragraph it could be a different time period. (I read another book like that a long time ago and it didn't bother me in that book so I'm not sure what my problem with it was this time. I can't pinpoint it). It is so sad that a nonviolent protest ended so horribly violent. And the ending of the book??

[Lauren · Rating 4 out of 5]

1999 seems like a few years ago: It was the spring I graduated from high school - the autumn that I started University.

Your Heart is a Muscle the Size of a Fist outlines the way that the world has changed dramatically in the last 17(!) years - but also how people stay the same.

Globalization was not new, but it is something that the collective consciousness was beginning to pay attention to in 1999. This book looks at one night - the first night of the World Trade Organization's meeting in Seattle - and the subsequent protests-turned-riots. Many characters - law enforcement, protesters, politicians, friends, and family - intertwining and doing what they believe to be right.



The book's action is non-stop and fast-paced. Even amongst the violence and unrest, there is a real tenderness to the story.

Sunil Yapa's background in economics and geography bring an understanding to the story, but also a heart to the characters, on both sides of the picket line.

It's extraordinary and I definitely recommend.

Related links about the Seattle WTO riots I read after I finished the book:

"The Dark Side of Globalization: Why Seattle's 1999 Protestors Were Right" from The Atlantic.
University of Washington's WTO History Project
Seattle Municipal Archives

[Michael Livingston · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fast-paced, chaotic, a bit confusing and ultimately an attempt to make the world a better place - surely I can't be the first to draw parallels between this book and the massive WTO protests in Seattle around which it's set. There are a few too many neat coincidences for this to really hit home, but Yapa does build the drama expertly so that it's very hard to stop reading.

[Betsy Robinson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Cinematic, commercial literary fiction. With a feeling reminiscent of the wonderful new TV series American Crime, this is the story of individual people and their relationships within the bloody 1999 protest against the World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle. All sides — police and protestors, with a focus on a father cop and estranged son protestor, as well as other characters — are believably represented, which is emotionally powerful.

I'm so torn about this book that I've hesitated to review it. The text alternates between being exquisite and annoyingly overwritten. There were moments I was in awe, moved, and admiring of this epic story about "the whole ugly beautiful thing" that is our life on this planet. Then other times, I almost screamed at the relentless flashbacks and narrative discourses just when the plot had worked up momentum.

Many of the flashbacks are to fill in characters' histories, and sometimes this resulted in confusion: the time and place of different memories/events tumbled out in such a way that I didn't always know what was happening now (1999) and what was history. For example, in this scene, a woman named King is in the middle of ministering to her fellow protestors. It has been established three paragraphs earlier that she once lived with her boyfriend, John Henry, in a shipping container on the top of a hill:

She fought the urge to just turn and run. There were bodies laying [sic] everywhere, the police wading through the pile up, three or four cops walking with spray bottles that looked like small fire extinguishers, the spray looping over them in an arc. King kept her head down. She kept her hands clean as she tried to remember what John Henry had taught her.

The best protection is a gas mask. However, we can no longer recommend the Israeli gas mask as the lenses have been known to shatter on impact.

King saw a woman on her knees in the middle of the intersection. Her hands clasped in prayer, her face a mask of running blood.

Of course the locals thought they were crazy. But on their hill they had no neighbors. On a clear day, a hundred, two hundred miles of vision. Sight lines in every direction. No neighbors who could see like this.

I'm guessing that last paragraph is a reference to living in the shipping container. And this is then followed by the story of an arrest that took place (when?) in New York City.

However the flashbacks do not always kill the drama; sometimes they work organically. In other words, the skill level is uneven.

On the positive side, the book's subject is timed perfectly to our current cultural police/people rift and I suspect there will be people who will rave about it, with none of my reservations. Your Heart Is a Muscle the Size of a Fist is smartly written by Sunil Yapa, a first-time novelist who has all his ducks in a row (education, jobs, connections). Were I a lot younger and a completely different person than I am — smart, practical, and capable of understanding what sells and that I wanted a career writing novels — I would use this guy as a role model. MFA lit students, take a look! This is how it’s done.

I received an advanced reading copy of this book at BookExpo America. The pub date isn't until January 2016. Perhaps there will be more editing before the final version.

[Shawn Mooney (Shawn Breathes Books) · Rating 3 out of 5]

First of all, reading Your Heart is a Muscle the Size of a Fist made me fall more than a little in love with Sunil Yapa. What a generous, large-hearted vision he brought to this, his debut novel.

Over the course of the first day of the infamous 1999 Seattle WTO protests, we dip into the consciousness of three police officers, including the chief; three protesters, including the police chief's long-lost son; and a Sri Lankan delegate, who has flown in to seek his nation's membership in the WTO and to meet with President Clinton.

In attempting to bridge the divide between the cops, the protestors, and the third world delegate, Yapa has coated this tale of state and police brutality in a healing salve. The novel is stitched together by hundreds of stunning, gasp-worthy sentences. This guy can write! And he has spun an operatic plot – the structure reminded me a bit of Patchett's 'Bel Canto' - through which the story unfolds perfectly.

But ultimately, and reluctantly, I have to say that the coat of salve too often oozed an airy-fairy sentimentality, not at all meeting the violence of the novel on an equal footing, failing to explain or heal it. The darkness won here, ruining the novel Yapa was trying to write, despite his best efforts to force the opposite triumph.

It's so difficult to write about idealists, about sociopolitical protest, and I gave Yapa the benefit of the doubt throughout most of the novel. But the ending, which was supposed to be moving and affirming, left me absolutely cold. In particular, the concluding scene with the Sri Lankan delegate struck me as cringe-makingly forced and hokey.

I'll use that book review cliché – 'there is much to admire here' – to express my optimistic hope that Yapa shall pull it off - a saccharine-stripped meeting of heart and fist – after more life and writing experience. He did not do so here. A sugarcoating is no match for a clenched fist, but the core / coeur / courage...the heart of things: now that's another story altogether…

[Superstition Review · Rating 5 out of 5]

“A thousand voices hoarse with fear and rage. A thousand voices joined in rhythm. It was a primal sound, a roar like a waterfall, a thousand voices becoming for the briefest of moments one voice, one roar, threaded through with frustration and yearning, their desperation to break through to another plane. One where the city belonged to them and they had no reason to be afraid.”
Your Heart is a Muscle the Size of Your Fist is a novel about people. Sunil Yapa writes about the protest that took place at the end of the 20th century in Seattle against the WTO among other things. Although the book unravels in a matter of hours, Yapa manages to write characters with depth. He alternates between seven characters each with a unique perspective on the situation and unique experiences that shaped them into the people they are at that moment in time. Among these characters are the protesters, the officers, and even a delegate. Each point of view has merit and adds meaning to the work. Overall, Yapa’s language is visceral and energizing. His words aren’t merely beautiful. They are forceful and evocative.
By Claudia Estrada

[Amy · Rating 4 out of 5]

God help us, we are mad with hope. Here we come.

This novel walks a fine line between eye-rolling earnestness and conscience-shaking indictment. It worked for me, it will not work for some. A dozen themes and portraits of inequality presented within: I highly recommend reading.

This passage from one of the delegates from a third-world county desperately seeking entrance into the WTO to gain an inkling of trade parity sums up the message of the day's tale well:

But he knew It was only human nature to believe it best to ignore suffering. To focus on your own good fortune. The human survival mechanism. To say your prayers, thank your gods, and hold your breath when you pass the slums. The sweet poison of privilege wasn’t it? To think blindness a preferable condition.

And yet, there they were, whether you wanted to see it or not. The unwanted of the world. People begging on the street. People without enough to eat. People without the medicine and doctors to make them well. People without proper clothes or homes, without clean water to bathe or drink.

Did these self-congratulatory club members think their inherited wealth came from nowhere save their miraculous good luck? Did they not find a connection between their obscene wealth and the obscene poverty all around them? Perhaps it was too much to suggest the fault was theirs alone. The upper class was too god-damned stupid to be blamed, frankly. But how could they do nothing? How could they look upon their fellow creatures suffering and do absolutely nothing? He didn’t have an answer for that.

Alongside this:

What preceded success was not moral courage, but moral compromise.

[Richard Derus · Rating 4 out of 5]

A LOVELY SURPRISE GIFT. THANK YOU.

My Review: First, read this:

Doing something, he had discovered, anything, however small, that contributed to your meaningfulness of self and surroundings—well, that was the trick. That was the trick to not feel like shit.
–and–
What is the function of the heart, if not to convince the blood to stay moving with the limits where it belongs, to stay at home.
Stay at home, stay at home, stay at home.

But restless thing that it is, your blood, it leaps into the world.
–and–
...{T}hey learned that courage is not the ability to face your fear, heroically, once, but is the strength to do it day after day. Night after night. Faith without end. Love without border.

What the 1999 WTO Protests taught the reactionaries around the world was that there was nothing they could do to win the hearts of the people. They set about controlling their bodies instead. As Author Yapa put it, "...how deep the darkness of the heart which longs for control," and there it is out in the open. The hearts of a few demand that the world obey them, obey their darkness, and submit to external control.

None of the seven PoV characters in this story are without that darkness. They're all on trajectories that will not allow then to remain unbruised and unbattered by life, and more particularly by the awfulness of demanding economic justice from those whose entire way of life, whose whole sense of self, is rooted in and branches from their hoarded wealth. There are those whose one need in this life is to deny others what they want and/or need (preferably both) so they can Win, they can be seen to be Right because they've won! Then there are those whose one need in this life is to take away what it is they've decided is unfairly denied to others:

They wanted to tear down the borders, to make a leap into a kind of love that would be like living inside a new human skin, wanted to dream themselves into a life they did not yet know. He heard them in the streets saying, “Another world is possible,” and beneath his ribs broken and healed and twice broken and healed and thrice broken and healed, he shuddered and thought, God help us. We are mad with hope. Here we come.
–and–
Tiresome people, but he knew it was only human nature to believe it best to ignore suffering, to focus on your own good fortune. The human survival mechanism: to say your prayers, thank your gods, and hold your breath when you passed the slums. The sweet poison of privelege, wasn't it? To think blindness a preferable condition.

And neither side of this divide sees the grim and angry reality: They're one coin. Heads, tails, maybe they're aesthetically distinct but they're one zero-sum-game playing piece of a coin. It would be funny if it weren't so tragic.

The central spine of the book, for this reader, is the story of Bishop and Victor...father and son, estranged, and truly, absolutely the same man, the same wounded-by-loss, blinded-by-love man. Just as sad as father-and-son estrangements always are. Just as inevitable as the voice of experience being unable to be the ears of acceptance that a rudderless, shallow-drafted dinghy of a boy needs to find a channel in the rough storms he can't avoid:

“What we require of others so that we may live our lives of easy convenience. Dad, there are people who work all day every day for thirty years assembling the three wires that make a microwave timer beep. What are we supposed to think of this? How do they survive it? Why do we ask them to?”
–and–
“Son, how easily an open heart can be poisoned, how quickly love becomes the seeds of rage. Life wrecks the living.”

Singing the same song, different verses, and different keys...the minor key of youthful wounds, the major key of adult scars.

What you need to know is that Author Yapa wrote a polyphonic poem, a written kōan to the concept of connection and belonging. What you want to read needs to be story of discovering yourself in many places, seeing your wounds and worlds across gulfs of experience and of time as you seek out the hand, the heart, the warm and welcoming shoulder to shelter and comfort you:

It was 1999 in America, he had traveled the world for three years, looking for what he didn’t know, and now here he found himself: absolutely allergic to belief, nineteen years old, and totally alone.
–and–
And yet there he was, his son, looking and smiling through his half-opened eyes, not a look of concern, but as if he understood in some way, the sometime knowledge of what this is, the knowledge of the whole ugly beautiful thing, the knowledge of the courage it takes to move into fear and to fuck up and to go on living, knowing that sometimes it is two people alone and some small kindness between them that is not even called family, or forgiveness, but might be what some, on the good days, call love.

Good days or bad, that is its name: Love. There are strands to this too-short, too-scattered narrative that seek their love, that clutch their illusions of love; but in this father, whose son is not his flesh and blood but is his, and this son, whose world refuses to stop hurting and whose heart can't make itself heard yet, there is a beautiful, complete love of like-minded men.

If that's a story you need to read, as I did, then get this into your hands at once.

[Celia · Rating 3 out of 5]

This novel details one day in the history of protest: the 1999 WTO protests, aka, the Battle in Seattle.

It is an interesting study of seven participants : what motivates their actions and they, as people.

John Henry: organizer and planner. Maps out the city. Coordinates the lockdown that snarls the intersections surrounding the convention center. Peaceful and full of love. The Heart.

King: John Henry's lover who has a violent secret. On the spectrum of peacefulness, fighting to maintain her own.

Victor: 19 and an orphan. Grieving over his mother's death and his estrangement from his stepfather. Wants to belong somewhere.

Officer Timothy Park: line cop, easily riled, survivor of Oklahoma City bombings.

Lo: Park's partner; female.

Chief Bishop: Victor's stepfather. More peaceful than most. Wants his son back.

Delegate Wickramsinghe: caught between the protestors and the police. In fact, his parts of the story are described in sections called intermissions. Is lobbying for his country, Sri Lanka, to be included in the WTO.

The demonstration starts out peacefully, but morphs into violence.

Even the title of the book 'morphs'. The Heart (love) becomes the Fist (anger). The Muscle (strength), bridges the two.

You can see that there is much to consider in this story. Sadly, it seems, that, in the attempt to stretch one day's happenings into a 300 page book, the thoughts and some of the descriptions become rambling and pedantic.

I do recommend the book to anyone who wants to learn more about protests and how police can sometimes handle them. Globalization and the ills it promulgates are covered too.

Just be prepared for some of the tedious sections!

[Cecil Paddywagon · Rating 1 out of 5]

And how, he wondered—or did he?—could he insert more urgency to the plot, more thump thump thump to the fear-quaking heart, the very heart that is a muscle the size of a fist, your fist, the fist of uprising, of freedom, of redemption? How, he wondered—and yes, he did wonder, yes, he did—how could he make his specious thoughts, the thoughts of the brain, the brain, a muscle like the heart, but different—how could he, the writer, the creator, the master of words, words, which bring freedom, words, which form freedom's very essence, it's essential core, it's soul, this master of words: how could he make his words sound more important, more—what was the word?—resonating. How could the author make his fatuous story, filled with it's boring stock characters, which all sound the same, how can he make it, his story, how could he make it seem more, well, literary? More raw,?

He bent down to tie his shoe. These shoes were made for walking, he thought, the notion bursting like a supernova from somewhere deep inside of him. And that's just what they'll do. That's how the song goes, right? No—if was boots, not shoes. Damn; he was doing it again. Thinking too much. But how could he not? Shoes, boots. Shoes. Boots. Boats. What were boots but not little boats for the feet? Feet! He chuckled to himself as he tied his shoe—no, his boot—his little foot boat. You'll always be a boot to me, he thought. You'll always be a boot to me.
A bird, blue like lightning, flew overhead.

[Dan Radovich · Rating 5 out of 5]

The story Yapa tells in this wondrous work takes place over the course of one afternoon in 1999 Seattle at the World Trade Organization meeting. Victor is a young runaway searching for himself and money - so he opts to sell marijuana to the thousands of gathered protesters. His father, Bishop, is police chief in charge. The estrangement of these two is not cliche as written by Yapa. Chapters alternate to tell the story of characters fighting for peace - fighting for change - fighting for power. His doesn't fill the story with minor characters, no need for that since he only has a few hours worth of storytelling time. Some may complain that there is not enough growth - which I disagree with loudly. You know Victor and Bishop well before this story is over, you may not like how they end up... but you know them and can appreciate the journey told in the pages.

[Jennifer (Insert Lit Pun) · Rating 2 out of 5]

1.5 stars. This book is a hot mess. It takes place over one day during the World Trade Organization riots in Seattle in 1999, and follows protesters, police officers, and a political delegate. Yapa’s style is intentionally chaotic, and he purposefully draws everything out as much as possible because he wants to fully immerse the reader in the story’s energy and emotion. But the writing constantly strays from dramatic to overwrought, flashbacks are clumsily inserted at random moments, and Yapa repeats and rephrases things so often that I started to wonder if his publishers planned on marketing this book to goldfish. Can’t say I recommend this one.

[Nathan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well-written, character-driven fiction. I loved the cast...even the ones I hated. The setting was perfect. This book really made me think. I may end up bumping it up to five stars after I digest it for a while.

[Loring Wirbel · Rating 4 out of 5]

The societal institutional and cultural memory seems to be fraying and becoming more transitory with each passing day. We all carry group memories of Kent State or Wounded Knee, but how many people remember 1999's Battle for Seattle, or any of the anti-World Trade Organization protests that followed through the time of the Bush election? Yapa writes about Nov. 30, 1999 less than 20 years later, and it all seems a distant dream. In fact, in the aftermath of the collapse of the Doha rounds in the world trade talks, it becomes difficult to remember why the protests against the "Washington Consensus" got so heated. Will our institutional memory of Occupy Wall Street similarly fall apart before 2025?

Yapa wants to make sure those memories are preserved. It's interesting that one of his characters on the protesting side of the barriers was earlier involved in various tree-sitting movements, because Richard Powers attempted in the 2019 novel The Overstory to insure that the tree-sitters of the 1980s and 1990s were not forgotten. But were both authors' efforts for naught?

Yapa's short novel has the gripping tension of an action-filled popular tome, while his narrative passages reach the caliber of literary fiction. If the two styles were woven together a little more deftly, the book would earn five stars, but the mere fact he tried to paint such a passionate yet complex picture of the Battle of Seattle makes the novel well worth a read with the more cautionary four stars rather than five.

Its only flaw in implementation seems to stem from Yapa holding too romanticist a view of the world itself, and of protest movements against large stultifying social structures, from governments to corporations. His romanticism causes him to make the trajectory of the plot a little too predictable, as heroes and villains are painted pretty uniformly in black and white. The dialogue and flashbacks seek to minimize any cliches, but they are still there.

Romanticism causes a bigger Achilles Heel by leading the author to overstate certain cases - yes, this is fiction based on an historical event, but caution is still warranted. First of all, no protester died in Seattle, and the police violence, though extreme, was not as over the top as depicted. The reason the public retained negative impressions of Seattle (if they even paid attention to news that day) was not simply because of the media's sensational "if it bleeds, it leads" tendencies, but also because the anarchist Black Bloc always was trying to move to the head of the party - and too many protesters stretching from Nov. 30, 1999 to Occupy Wall Street in 2011 tended to romanticize the Black Bloc, just as the author did, even when they claimed they didn't. The interaction between the Sri Lankan trade delegate and the WTO director-general was a little too stereotyped as well. At the end of the day, the leadership of the WTO really didn't give a damn about smaller nations, but the director-general in 1999 was in reality Mike Moore, a former New Zealand prime minister who had a much more liberal reputation than the fictitious Teddy Bradford.

The reason that this matters is that the sinister nature of the bad guys was real, and did not need this exaggeration. Maybe most cops don't act like Park or Bishop, but most cops sent out to quell protests really are demons, even if their tactics were more subtle than Yapa suggests. Similarly, Bill and Hillary Clinton, Madeleine Albright, and their pals who promoted the Washington Consensus, really were pretty evil people, even if the sinister nature was more subtle than Yapa suggested. The problem with radical romanticism, even in fiction, is that when you go beyond what the facts on the ground would suggest, people consider you as possibly less reliable for other details.

But Yapa could genuinely counter that this was not a nonfiction analysis of N30. It is a work of fiction, and a bit of passionate romanticism helped carry the story. Perhaps. It's a damned fine book, and it tells of an event that many should remember better. But just as I prefer Game of Thrones to Lord of the Rings because I believe in shades of ethics rather than pure good fighting pure evil, I think that Yapa could have made the book more powerful with a shade less romanticism.

[Kim · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a book definitely out of my comfort zone. While I had marked it as a TBR back in the day, I truly decided to read it for a challenge (letter Y is hard to come by). I’m very glad I read it though.

It reminded me of when I had time and energy to care about things greater than the scope of my every day. When I had bigger dreams and goals than I have over the past few years. Currently existing but not necessarily living for purpose. I feel reignited but the individual stories in this book.

Sometimes the book was a little too literary for me, more artistic than straight story. I haven’t read a book of this style in a while and I remember why. It’s a bit more to push through than the lovely fantasies I e hidden in since 2020. It was good to branch out.