Brother Book Review
So this one is a weird one. It is not sci-fi, it is good old, regular, normal fiction. I read it for a writing course I took. Personally, I thought it was meh. The story is about an immigrant family in Toronto and their grief.
I think part of the reason I didn’t like it is that it isn’t in my genre and I prefer to read about odd situations and imaging what I would do in them. As an immigrant myself, I can imagine myself well in the situation described in Brother and there is nothing overly exciting about it. Although it is a different story than mine, it’s not that different. The other women in my class (yes, they were all women) liked the book, but that’s the type of stuff they would normally read.
Another issue was that I didn’t connect with the characters. I’m not sure whether it’s because of the writing or the characters themselves. I didn’t care about what will happen to them and how the story will end.
The good part of the book is how it’s structured. It jumps from past to present, chapter to chapter, which gives a deeper meaning to what happens in the present. It is an interesting device and well used.
Despite my lukewarm-ness to it, I was oddly compelled to finish it and it is a short book with 192 pages.
So, if once in a while you like to read literary fiction, I’d recommend it, otherwise skip it.
