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Summary
Summary
Grief-stricken after his mother's death and three years of wandering the world, Victor is longing for a family and a sense of purpose. He believes he's found both when he returns home to Seattle only to be swept up in a massive protest. With young, biracial Victor on one side of the barricades and his estranged father -- the white chief of police -- on the opposite, the day descends into chaos, capturing in its confusion the activists, police, bystanders, and citizens from all around the world who'd arrived that day brimming with hope. By the day's end, they have all committed acts they never thought possible.
As heartbreaking as it is pulse-pounding, Yapa's virtuosic debut asks profound questions about the power of empathy in our hyper-connected modern world, and the limits of compassion, all while exploring how far we must go for family, for justice, and for love.
Author Notes
Sunil Yapa received his MFA from Hunter College, where he was awarded the Alumni Scholarship & Welfare Fund Fellowship and was selected twice as the Esquire Fiction Intern. In June 2010, he won the Asian American Short Story Award. In May 2010, Yapa was the writer-in-residence at the Norman Mailer Writers' Colony in Provincetown, Massachusetts. The son of a Sri Lankan father, and a mother from Montana, Yapa grew up in Pennsylvania, and has since traveled and lived in 48 states and 35 countries.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Yapa's chilling debut is set amid the real-life protests that disrupted the 1999 World Trade Organization Ministerial Conference in Seattle, which resulted in hundreds of arrests, police resignations, and an increased media spotlight on the WTO. The novel follows a fictional group of police officers, dissidents, and a diplomat as they struggle through the summit's first chaotic day, full of tear gas, epiphany, and violence. On one side are the activists and their hangers-on: Victor, a nomadic 19-year-old trying to sell weed to protesters; King and John Henry, veteran nonviolent advocates who arrive at the protests to act as medics; and Charles, a political representative from Sri Lanka who quickly finds himself a target of both protesters and police. Representing the law are Chief Bill Bishop, Victor's estranged stepfather, bent on protecting his city; and officers Tim and Julia, whose past run-ins with terrorism and riots influence their fierce approach to peace. Yapa shows great skill in juggling these seven narratives as he builds a combustible environment, offering brief glimpses of the past to round out each character-and in the case of King, to reveal a deadly secret. As the peaceful protests turn brutal, however, the author's firm grasp of his story loosens a bit. But by the novel's end, Yapa regains his stride, resulting in a memorable, pulse-pounding literary experience. Agent: P.J. Mark, Janklow & Nesbit Associates. (Jan.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Guardian Review
This debut, set during the Seattle World Trade Organisation protests of November 1999, aims to reanimate a lost moment of violence and hope for the left Millennials might struggle to believe it, but there was a political world before the Manichean split of 9/11. Sunil Yapa's debut, set during the Seattle World Trade Organisation protests of November 1999, aims to reanimate a lost moment of violence and hope for the left -- as in the title, tenderness and trauma go hand-in-hand all the way through. We are put right in the thick of it, where anticorporate chants rise and pepper spray flies. Vibrantly told and jumping from consciousness to consciousness with each chapter, the novel is a crowd scene in 302 pages: young black runaway Victor is the stepson of the white police chief Bishop, who is in command of officers Park and Ju, who are in a confrontation out on the streets with old-hand activist John Henry and his firebrand ally King, who draw Victor into the protests when he stumbles their way. One of the key protest tactics described in the book is the formation of immovable human circles by locking wrists together inside sleeves of tubing, and the relationships connecting the characters form a closed circle too. Only one character -- Dr Charles Wickramshaw, the Sri Lankan envoy to the WTO negotiations -- exists outside this loop, his efforts to reach his meetings frustrated by the crowd that claims to speak for his country. Where Yapa succeeds is in evoking the interconnectedness that the antiglobalisation movement both responded to and attempted to transcend. "It was like a radio dial between stations," thinks Victor as he is swept into the crowd with its disparate demands, "the way they chanted and cried. The overlapping voices like whispers of other realms -- come in London, Paris, France." The book achieves the same effect, a wave-scanning flicker through the characters' skulls. Less pleasingly, the neatness with which the characters are arranged saps some of the tension. There is no question of these people not meeting: the geometry of the novel dictates it. The circle simply rolls them into place. Inevitably, with so many cast members to be explored, some characters end up more fully formed than others, and (as with David Shafer's politically sympathetic 2015 caper Whiskey Tango Foxtrot), it's the women who come off worst. One of the first things we learn about both activist King and officer Ju is that they're attractive, and they both follow the slightly tedious sexy-tough-girl template -- for example, King remembers a Greenpeace campaigner attempting to rape her. It's an incident that recalls cases of male sexual violence against women in the later Occupy movement -- cases that raised painful questions about groups claiming to be radically non-hierarchical. As Rebecca Solnit (whom Yapa acknowledges as a source) noted in her essay " The Longest War ": "violence is first of all authoritarian. It begins with this premise: I have the right to control you." But the attempted rape of King is not used to explore the conflicted persistence of misogyny within activism. Instead, King fights her attacker off and the incident serves only to show how kickass she is. The novel is sharper on the divisions of race: Victor astutely notes that his blackness puts him in a different relationship to the police than his newfound white comrades. "You met with the cops? Wow. It must be nice to be white," he says when they explain they have negotiated a mass arrest. And if Yapa downplays the faults of the protesters, he's also guilty of overplaying the conscious evil of what they protest against. When envoy Charles finally makes it to the Washington State Convention and Trade Center, he meets Sir Teddy, director general of the WTO, who monologues on the secret logic of global capitalism with all the subtlety of a cartoon supervillain. The question of what makes violence legitimate runs through the novel, but the novel is also in love with violence. The means overwhelm the ends. "If you are not afraid of dying, then what freedom you fucking feel. What freedom there is to burn and wreck," thinks King. Yapa writes lyrically about violence, and the lyricism runs away with the novel, in the same way that violence runs away with the protest. The book is a gorgeous riot against injustice but, as in 1999, it's not obvious what should come after the conflagration. * To order Your Heart Is a Muscle the Size of a Fist for [pound]11.99 (RRP [pound]14.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over [pound]10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of [pound]1.99. - Sarah Ditum.
Kirkus Review
A ground-level reimagining of the violent protests at the 1999 World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle, told from a host of perspectives. The emotional core of Yapa's debut novel is the fraughtly named Victor, a 19-year-old who's come to Seattle after a few years of globe-trotting to sharpen his social-justice sensibilitiesand to confront his stepfather, the fraughtly named Bishop, head of the city's police force. The downtown streets are swarming with protesters determined to halt the movement of WTO delegates, who are seen as pillaging poorer nations in the name of free trade, and the story bounces dutifully among a handful of characters representing the various factions. There's John Henry, a middle-aged and weathered protest vet; Timothy, a hotheaded cop impatient with nonviolent resistance; King, a live-wire tough-talker; Julia, a cop who's softened following a stint in Los Angeles policing the Rodney King riots; and Charles, a Sri Lankan delegate baffled by the chaos in the streets but determined to make his meetings. Yapa's grasp of the pre-9/11 global diaspora is sound, and he's knowledgeable about the tactics that both protesters and law enforcement use against each other. But lacking much in the way of deep characterizationwe are meant to believe that Bishop made a bonfire of Victor's mother's lefty books and that Victor fled the country because of itthe novel is largely a parade of pat sentiments and facile contradictions. King is committed to nonviolencebut does she have a violent past? Charles cares for his countrymenbut is he selling them out? The purpler prose only highlights the thinness of the storytelling: Bishop has "a heart full of loss and a head full of doom"; chanting, John Henry says, is "how we hold the fear in our mouths and transform it into gold." American novels about protest have been thin on the ground since the days of Ken Kesey and Edward Abbey. The genre deserves a better revival effort than this. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Yapa's gripping debut offers a fiery and twisting fictional take on the 1999 WTO protests in Seattle. Seen through the eyes of multiple narrators, the events surrounding the shutdown of Seattle's streets are brought to vivid life and laid bare. A young runaway is inadvertently caught up in the fervor; a seasoned organizer acts with compassion and strength; the chief of police resists government pressures to turn against the protestors; a WTO delegate from Sri Lanka seeks a foothold for his country in the powerful organization all of these characters and more collide with each other in the charged atmosphere that so many watched from afar in 1999. Yapa is a skilled storyteller, revealing just enough about his characters and the direction of his plot to engage his readers, yet effectively building dramatic impact by withholding certain key details. In the style of Colum McCann's Let the Great World Spin (2009), Yapa ties together seemingly disparate characters and narratives through a charged moment in history, showing how it still affects us all in different ways.--Paulson, Heather Copyright 2015 Booklist
Library Journal Review
This debut novel set during the 1999 World Trade Organization (WTO) riots in Seattle is a punch in the gut. In the years after Kent State and Rodney King but before the Black Lives Matter movement, the Battle of Seattle stands out as an example of poorly planned police response to public protest, and Yapa shines a blinding Maglite on the scene. He starts with Victor, the estranged adopted son of the police chief. All Victor wants is to unload a large quantity of marijuana so he can "break free from the gravity of home's heavy hold." Instead, he gets mixed up with John Henry, a middle-aged idealistic revolutionary and King, his badass former lover who ministers to the teargassed crowd with Maaloxr-infused water. In addition to Chief Bishop, who's acutely aware that his long-lost son has reappeared under an I-5 underpass, there are two cops: Julia, and her partner Park, severely disfigured and completely insane. Rounding out the cast is Dr. Charles Wickramsinghe, a delegate from Sri Lanka, whose life's work has been negotiating for his country's acceptance into the WTO. VERDICT Yapa's writing is visceral and unsparing. Noteworthy, capital-I Important and a ripping read, his novel will be on many "best" lists in 2016. [See Prepub Alert, 8/1/15; "Editors' Fall Picks," LJ 9/1/15.]-Christine Perkins, Whatcom Cty. Lib. Syst., Bellingham, WA © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.