Reviews and Comments

Nu Nu Yi begins the story by threading through a handoff of perspectives between those at the Taungbyon festival: from a pickpocket, to a wealthy woman asking for good fortune, to the spirit wives themselves, all tied to this event. Toward the latter half of the story, we are set through a drama focusing on Daisy Bond in particular into the end of the festival period. As a whole it's not too long of a read and does well to propel you to another world that pulls the curtains back behind a festival, showing what people are really thinking when it comes to spirits, love, wealth, and power.

The Taungbyon festival is not something that my family participated in, yet it's one of my main connections to queer trans history in Myanmar. Natkadaws are spirit wives, composed of effeminate gay men, trans women, others elsewhere and in between, and those who are not a part of that at all—but are looking to profit off the festival. It is difficult to read this book with the way it captures the queerphobia and transphobia that has it mark on the majority of people in society. I see how my family might struggle to imagine I might be anything like them. If not for their role as spirit wives, their identities would not hold them to any standard of acknowledgement, though given it is driven by the colonizers discretion, this didn't necessarily leave them any better off. I wonder what those festivals might be like now with the most recent coup and pandemic; it would be hard to get any of my family to tell me.

I randomly came across this audio book in my uni's collection. I first learned about Marie Kondo first came out in 2014. Since middle school, I have been vertical folding, and have been notoriously known for having organized collections. Much of the specifics I have forgotten since then, but it motivated something special in me about my own spaces, though in combination with cultural expectations, many of those initial words of advice have become diluted. Yet as I've distanced from it along with the ways it's been tied into trauma, with her own Netflix show, Kondo has become as popular as ever.

The Afrominimalist is well aware of these trends and is what I needed to ground myself in what minimalism means to me and my cultures. The Afrominimalist looks at the context of why our spending and owning habits have formed to what they are today, and how we engage intentionally with what should come next. Furthermore, it considers minimalism not just from an environmentalist perspective but from an environmental justice perspective, considering the impacts of what we buy on labor and the natural world. I'm in the process of planning a move in a few months, and it'll be an important time for me to sort through everything I've got and decide what I'll be taking with me into a new chapter of my life where I want to stay true to myself. I will definitely be reflecting on the questions posed in this book. I also liked the featured contributions that were incorporated into this book, showcasing multiple perspectives, interpretations, and relationships that are all valid in this dialogue.

• I listened to this as an audiobook, my first checked out from Libby.
• I liked the narrator's voice and felt it was generally quite well to meet the range of voices for the characters.
• The book took too long to build up and the ending was too abstract and fell apart.
• I also generally didn't like or understand why the characters were selected with the traits they had.
• Some of the dialogue felt well played, while others felt jarring
• In the end, my favorite part is Klara's relationship with the sun, which goes for the most part unexplored with other characters. This book has vague environmentalist themes.
• many of the tropes that show up in this book I feel, have been better expressed in other works I've read.
• I think this book would be fine for a middle schooler as it goes generally without much complexity with its readability. Though I do think it should be followed with journaling or a book discussion. I would be curious how this book could be used to engage youth about AI ethics.

I have been on a search for books on Myanmar, especially those written by people of heritage there too. At the end of the book, the bio mentions in a quick sentence that he was born in India to Burmese parents, but I cannot find anywhere online if this is in reference to ethnicity or nationality. It is from stories of his family that send him on a five year research journey for this book. One must be careful to consider what is fact, what is fiction, and what we can only surmise because what has been lost.

At some points of the book, things felt way too drawn out, at others, it felt too short. But as someone who has not read a true storyteller's story in a long time, I began to find much joy and excitement from reading this book. If I had followed my plans, I might have finished it in just over two months, and rather: I finished it in under one! With momentum I pushed forward. And it was brutal for so many days to feel such attachment to characters, so many who do not get any resolve. He covers a vast, rich history, where you encounter more than 5 generations of narratives.

Yet, in many ways it was also a relief, a time to reflect on histories and the momentum that has existed while current news about home leaves me so disabled and numb. I think this book was good for me to read in this time in my life in a way I could appreciate it. While I may not be a strong literary critic, I cannot go without saying there is power in his writing. In some ways, I am a bit abashed to even share it. But I think it did something good for me, to have someone acknowledge how complex it can be to have so many people whose lives are constantly intertwined yet their worldviews might be so vastly different. These are not stories that could be easily passed on at such a level to me by my parents and grandparents. A part of me knows they have been so affected that there are stories that they could never bear to reach my ears from their own mouths. Still, I have a desire to know, I see the edges curling around the makeshift walls they've placed along my path and I can't help but peel them back and see the path for myself so I can go beyond.