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asianamlitfansWritten by Soraya Gnei Zarook
Edited by Lina Jiang
I’m always thrilled to read anything that has to do with Sri Lanka that isn’t marketed as a trauma text. So My Sweet Girl by Amanda Jayatissa, a psychological thriller, was a book I was really excited about. It took me a while to get into the story, which felt like it was dragging at the start. I found the main character, Paloma, kind of insufferable, with her inability to know what on earth is going on in her own life, but that was by design, I think. About halfway through the book, I became so curious about what was going on that I couldn’t put it down and finished it in that sitting.
The novel is set between Sri Lanka and San Francisco, USA, and begins with Paloma trying to hold things together after she finds Arun, to whom she is subletting a bedroom in her apartment, murdered. We find out that Arun has learned of a deep dark secret that Paloma has been keeping, but she finds him dead in the apartment before she can confront him about it. And then, just as soon as she discovers this, his body disappears and Paloma must figure out if she has gotten so intoxicated lately that she is now hallucinating, or if something more sinister is going on with respect to her past. We learn that Paloma is also the adopted daughter of a white American couple, who chose her while visiting an orphanage they sponsored in Sri Lanka.
That’s all I will say about the plot because as someone who doesn’t read psychological thrillers, I don’t know how to avoid spoilers. So, instead I will say what else I enjoyed about this lovely work. First off, I’m impressed at how much this novel reminded me of home and of childhood, of living in the US as a Sri Lankan, and also of so many other texts, all at the same time. There’s likely much more references than the ones I caught, but I thought of Jane Eyre, A Little Princess, and Jordan Peele’s 2019 film, Us.
Aside from these allusions, the most fascinating aspect of the storyline is how it illuminates issues around scarcity of resources. The girls in the orphanage go to absolutely desperate measures to make sure they have the best chance at getting chosen for adoption. The proprietors of the orphanage themselves take on harmful practices in order to secure funds from donors to keep the orphanage open and running. There is desperation at every layer, so that Paloma’s childhood memories, which seem on the surface to be about her and her best friend in the orphanage, are laced through with arguments that center around the desire to be adopted. Childhood friendships don’t get to be simple and unencumbered in a space like this, but are always tested under the weight of needing to survive, of knowing that whatever respite is there in the present is temporary. Love and family, in this world, become resources to be fought for also.
It might sound like I am taking a murder mystery book and making it about something more than what it is, but I don’t think so. The novel might read as *simply* a psychological thriller to folks who have lived lives of relative privilege/comfort and never had to think much about the availability and distribution of resources. But if you do live in, have lived in, or are familiar with what life looks like in places that have been exploited by colonial systems and where you are not part of the elite in those places, then these issues of scarcity and survival are not only true, but they are commonplace. We do not think about them twice. As wrong as they are, the decisions taken by those in charge at the orphanage become understandable to me. This acceptance, I think, becomes its own kind of horror, and the novel forces us to take time to reflect on that.
Overall, I’m impressed that Jayatissa has created an enjoyable read where every plot point gets moved along swiftly by things that are considered too serious to be enjoyable: colonial legacies, whiteness, capitalism, transracial adoption, racism and assimilation. To me, these are the real psychological and material horrors lying under the surface of each decision characters make in the text, and placing these issues just beneath the action, rather than draping them in melancholy at the center, is a brilliant move. I can see a reading of the ghosts and mirroring in the model as ways to think about mourning, melancholia, and trauma, but I was much more absorbed by the novel’s take on what survival looks like in the wake of violence. Survival is complicated, the novel reminds us, and even if we cannot root for the ways in which some choose to survive, they certainly make for entertaining and surprising villains.
Buy the Book Here
Edited by Lina Jiang
I’m always thrilled to read anything that has to do with Sri Lanka that isn’t marketed as a trauma text. So My Sweet Girl by Amanda Jayatissa, a psychological thriller, was a book I was really excited about. It took me a while to get into the story, which felt like it was dragging at the start. I found the main character, Paloma, kind of insufferable, with her inability to know what on earth is going on in her own life, but that was by design, I think. About halfway through the book, I became so curious about what was going on that I couldn’t put it down and finished it in that sitting.
The novel is set between Sri Lanka and San Francisco, USA, and begins with Paloma trying to hold things together after she finds Arun, to whom she is subletting a bedroom in her apartment, murdered. We find out that Arun has learned of a deep dark secret that Paloma has been keeping, but she finds him dead in the apartment before she can confront him about it. And then, just as soon as she discovers this, his body disappears and Paloma must figure out if she has gotten so intoxicated lately that she is now hallucinating, or if something more sinister is going on with respect to her past. We learn that Paloma is also the adopted daughter of a white American couple, who chose her while visiting an orphanage they sponsored in Sri Lanka.
That’s all I will say about the plot because as someone who doesn’t read psychological thrillers, I don’t know how to avoid spoilers. So, instead I will say what else I enjoyed about this lovely work. First off, I’m impressed at how much this novel reminded me of home and of childhood, of living in the US as a Sri Lankan, and also of so many other texts, all at the same time. There’s likely much more references than the ones I caught, but I thought of Jane Eyre, A Little Princess, and Jordan Peele’s 2019 film, Us.
Aside from these allusions, the most fascinating aspect of the storyline is how it illuminates issues around scarcity of resources. The girls in the orphanage go to absolutely desperate measures to make sure they have the best chance at getting chosen for adoption. The proprietors of the orphanage themselves take on harmful practices in order to secure funds from donors to keep the orphanage open and running. There is desperation at every layer, so that Paloma’s childhood memories, which seem on the surface to be about her and her best friend in the orphanage, are laced through with arguments that center around the desire to be adopted. Childhood friendships don’t get to be simple and unencumbered in a space like this, but are always tested under the weight of needing to survive, of knowing that whatever respite is there in the present is temporary. Love and family, in this world, become resources to be fought for also.
It might sound like I am taking a murder mystery book and making it about something more than what it is, but I don’t think so. The novel might read as *simply* a psychological thriller to folks who have lived lives of relative privilege/comfort and never had to think much about the availability and distribution of resources. But if you do live in, have lived in, or are familiar with what life looks like in places that have been exploited by colonial systems and where you are not part of the elite in those places, then these issues of scarcity and survival are not only true, but they are commonplace. We do not think about them twice. As wrong as they are, the decisions taken by those in charge at the orphanage become understandable to me. This acceptance, I think, becomes its own kind of horror, and the novel forces us to take time to reflect on that.
Overall, I’m impressed that Jayatissa has created an enjoyable read where every plot point gets moved along swiftly by things that are considered too serious to be enjoyable: colonial legacies, whiteness, capitalism, transracial adoption, racism and assimilation. To me, these are the real psychological and material horrors lying under the surface of each decision characters make in the text, and placing these issues just beneath the action, rather than draping them in melancholy at the center, is a brilliant move. I can see a reading of the ghosts and mirroring in the model as ways to think about mourning, melancholia, and trauma, but I was much more absorbed by the novel’s take on what survival looks like in the wake of violence. Survival is complicated, the novel reminds us, and even if we cannot root for the ways in which some choose to survive, they certainly make for entertaining and surprising villains.
Buy the Book Here
