How To Be a Revolutionary

This one shouldn't have worked for me, it has most of the things I hate in a novel, multiple POV characters, back and forth in time and a rather slow start, with all of that going against it, it still managed to keep me engaged and not frustrated. The characters are compelling and they come across as very real and there's a constant low buzz of urgency to the story. The different POVs have distinct voices so it's pretty easy to keep up with who's talking. Overall, it's an elegantly constructed novel and also a pretty timely one.

More of a 4.25/4.5 than a true 4.

A sympathetic, unwaring untangling of leftist guilt during parallel revolutions. Jumping between contemporary Shanghai, pre-to-post communist China, and 1980s Cape Town, How to Be a Revolutionary is less concerned with historical specificity than the mutual grief and shame felt by those unable to save the people around them from state violence. It is both a condemnation of inaction and a challenging attempt to interrogate our complicity in ongoing atrocities.

Structurally, it's an ambitious bit of time traveling (if occasionally difficult to keep mentally organized). The second act's pacing slows considerably but in service of expanding on characters whose motivations near the end would otherwise read as reckless (if not outright cruel). There is still a pronounced amount of shock value in the final revelations which I am torn on, though the historical context makes it feel a bit more justified.

Recommend for fellow comrads struggling with apathy and guilt at how little any one person can do.