It's clear from the outset that The Weight of Our Sky is a labor of great pain, and a labor of tremendous love. **Content warnings: Racism, graphic violence, on-page death, OCD and anxiety triggers.** With a 24-hour curfew in place and all lines of communication down, it will take the help of a Chinese boy named Vincent and all of the courage and grit in Melati’s arsenal to overcome the violence on the streets, her own prejudices, and her djinn’s surging power to make it back to the one person she can’t risk losing. The Chinese and Malays are at war, and Mel and her mother become separated by a city in flames. On the evening of May 13th, 1969, racial tensions in her home city of Kuala Lumpur boil over. Unlike most other sixteen-year-olds though, Mel also believes that she harbors a djinn inside her, one who threatens her with horrific images of her mother’s death unless she adheres to an elaborate ritual of counting and tapping to keep him satisfied.īut there are things that Melati can't protect her mother from. Melati Ahmad looks like your typical moviegoing, Beatles-obsessed sixteen-year-old. A music-loving teen with OCD does everything she can to find her way back to her mother during the historic race riots in 1969 Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, in this heart-pounding literary debut.

The weight of our sky hanna alkaf