A review by aizataffendi
The Weight of Our Sky by Hanna Alkaf

3.0

I wanted to like this book, I really did.. but halfway through, I was already thinking of putting it down never to pick it back up again. But I thought that I should just proceed given that this was a book club pick to commemorate the Merdeka Month (Malaysia's National Month), a book that my friends and I chose because it was written by a local author and that it revolves around one of the darkest tragedies in our national history. The book started out really flat and although the plot picked up a few chapters after that, it went flat again before the end. I didn't know that the book talks about OCD too and as someone who was diagnosed with OCD a few years back, I was hoping that I could relate to the protagonist more when I first started reading it. But alas, I didn't and I had a really hard time reading the parts when she was bombarded with her intrusive thoughts (which she regards as the workings of a Djinn who lives inside her head). I felt very annoyed that they were repetitive (always the same thoughts and the persistent tappings. I think the author need not go all descriptive every single time it happens) that I just glossed through these parts as I progressed further into the book. As the other reviews have mentioned, I was also disappointed that there was a lack of character development and that there were a lot of missed opportunities to weave more details of the 13th May event itself with the plot that would have evoked a pensive mood amongst the readers as they draw out valuable lessons from the bloody event and learn to better appreciate the relative peace that we get to enjoy in Malaysia now. Re the repetitive descriptions of Melati's incessant Djinn/intrusive thoughts, I felt that the title "The Weight of Melati's Djinn" would have been more apt for the book.