Martyr!

My favorite parts of this book were dream sequences where the protagonist is dreaming about dialogues between all kinds of people (at one point, Lisa Simpson and Trump).

There's a deus ex machina that I didn't love, but the writing is great.

One of those books that is so beautiful, even when it makes you hurt. It’s the tenderness of the rose petal and the piercing of thorn all at once. Added to my list of all time favorites.

It was good! There was a plot point early on that kind of fucked with my suspension of disbelief and bugged me like a splinter the whole rest of the read, and some neatness in the plot that I wasn't totally buying/in the mood for. But I'm a sucker for expert prose, subtly handled subject matter, and readability so it won me over.

What a pity. It started so well, so funny and meaningful. And throughout, there were really deep and wonderful sentences. But there was just so much going, the main character, flashbacks to different characters, the Iran war, the downing of Flight 655, imagined dialogues between characters and famous people, excerpts from an imagined book etc. etc. It's a credit to how good of a writer Akbar is that it stays coherent. But to the end the story gets even more soap-opera and it just is not great.