Island of a Thousand Mirrors

This is another trigger warning: everything novel. I'm not given to spoilers, but I wish I'd been prepared for this because it caught me by surprise at well past halfway. So: TW: Violent rape. Violent murders. Violent trauma and tragedy and horrors of war. Caveat lector, biggus tempus.

Think hard: can you make it through that? If you can, I think you'll be rewarded. This is a beautiful, rich, graceful and highly intelligent work. Deeply moral, too, and frighteningly relevant to present-day (2022) USA: Munaweera paints a complex picture of a society where misogyny and racial intolerances are manipulated into hatreds, into a self-perpetuating cycle of radicalizing and violence in a way that has eerie parallels to much that we're living today. She also, minor spoiler, shows good people overcoming it despite trauma that is unimaginable to you or me.

The writing is lovely. Poetic in a way that even I, a total poetroglodyte, adored. Munaweera dances with words, with descriptions that take a half-second to click, and when they do they make me smile. Every time.

(Side note: is there a thing going on where writers are playing with first-person narrative in new interesting ways? Or have I just been noticing it more lately? Anyhow, it worked quite well here.)