She’d say [a prayer] and then clap three times and blow air on me. Phook marring, it was called. She said it would keep all the scary things away when I was little. But it didn’t. She was the scary thing in my life, and the prayer never kept her away. [loc. 1315]
Dunia Ahmed is the subject of a 'true crime' podcast series: she's been missing for over a year, after several very public attempts on her life. It's unclear why anyone would want to hurt her: she was a young woman of Pakistani heritage, a pharmacist in New York City, unmarried (and dealing with a broken engagement); she had a few good friends, though was estranged from her sister; her mother had recently died.
The story is told in many different voices, including 'Dunia at 5' and Dunia just before her disappearance, as well as the various guests on the (appallingly ghoulish) podcast. From quite early in the book it's apparent that Dunia had a difficult childhood. Her mother blamed Dunia for a number of unpleasant events, including her father's death, and Dunia was accused of making up stories about friends that nobody else could see.
The gradual revelation of what happened to Dunia is intriguing, but I wasn't as impressed with the way it was told. The awfulness of the podcast hosts was hammered home, and a lot of the dialogue and stream-of-consciousness was clunky and repetitive. The last third of the novel felt substantially different in tone, and made it into more of a mundane thriller. I did like Dunia's father's jinn stories, though, even though Dunia's mother hated them. With good reason.
Fulfils the ‘a sticker on the cover’ rubric of the 52 books in 2024 challenge.
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