Some hands parse out your darkest secrets. In this world, people of colour are occasionally bestowed strange powers called "hands," which are indeed tied to their physical hands. It's a noir, too: gritty, dark, embedded within the city's mobster underbelly. Trouble the Saints is a triptych of stories-three sections, three intertwined narrators-set in an alternate-history New York on the cusp of WWII. And I had a hard time grasping the magic behind the hands and numbers, which made it difficult to connect with the characters and their stakes. Often I'd catch myself drifting because the words on the page refused to cohere into any sort of plot in my head. We're immediately thrown to the world-building wolves, launching into convoluted gangster conspiracies without fanfare or context. I confess that I struggled for a significant portion of the book. But I also think it's important to say off the bat: While it wasn't the book for me, I would absolutely still recommend this for its unique exploration into legacies of trauma in BIPOC communities, and to anyone intrigued by preternatural assassins grappling with morality and mortality. I feel really conflicted about Trouble the Saints. until the colonized and the enslaved and the abused will rise up with the holy strength of the gods behind them and, together, we will make it right. When we return to the wheel of life, you and I, we will find one another again and again.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |