Nalia finds herself trapped in a strange and inescapable lucid dream. Danger looms ahead for her friends. Pressured out of their homes in the Lost Winds, every step threatens them with persecution and death.
Taking a daring route on a treacherous sea, they seek asylum in a new land. Will they make it to their destination? Will Nalia’s dream of finding peace in Draviland become the utopia that she desperately desires, or are the dangers of this new land even worse than her home?
Set in a real time, stream-of-consciousness narrative, this story takes you on a sweeping literary journey.
5.0 out of 5 stars, It carries you like the river Murma that flows through the village of the characters’ birth and spiritual home
Stream of consciousness soup laced with lucid dreaming and spiced with magical realism—served with a side of almost, but not quite conventional, narrative: this story of “children of the lesser gods,” down and out in a world that cares not what happens to them as they hope against hope to find peace and fulfillment is not for the faint of heart.
Progressively, sometimes simultaneously, the river of thoughts, feelings and conscious reactions of Mehreen Ahmed’s vividly drawn characters to the events occurring in their lives lays bare the oppressive underbelly of the societies they find themselves in. On the surface, it’s a tale of a vicious world, a tale of flight from unjust oppression in a nation state that would crush the body and soul into another that doesn’t want you. It is a novel of struggle and hope against all odds, “where killing mugging bloody Spillage were now all a part of our normal life,” depicted mostly in a continuous stream of consciousness flow uninterrupted either by conventional description, dialogue, punctuation, spelling, or grammar.
It is a challenging read, though once you become accustomed to the unique style, it carries you like the river Murma that flows through the village of the characters’ birth and spiritual home. Where Nalia, Pontu, Tahu, Pael and Mohammed each begin a journey in which their illusions and aspirations, sometimes literally their dreams, “hold life from falling apart, and propel them toward the fulfillment of a destiny.” Literary and historical references float like lotus pads among the flotsam and jetsam of the river their lives and the tale become, until each current of the river finds its source, its destiny, good or bad.
In the end, “the presence of the paradoxical absence of the ONE, and His selective random process as to who won and who didn’t was one of those many unresolved puzzles. However, His existence was as immutable as the law of gravity to the faithful.” In the end, you cannot help but be moved by this powerful, well-written, beautifully conceived tale.