A coming-of-age story about one boy's journey across contemporary Afghanistan to find and bring homethe family dog, blending the grit and immediacy of voice-driven fiction like We Need New Names with the myth-making of One Thousand and One Nights.
Twelve-year-old Marwand'smemories from his previous visit to Afghanistan six years ago centre on his contentious relationship with Budabash, the terrifying but beloved dog who guards his extended family's compound in Logar. Eager to find an ally in this place that's meant to be "home," Marwand approaches Budabash the way he would any dog on his American suburban block-and the results are disastrous: Marwand loses a finger and Budabash escapes.
The resulting search forthe family dog is an expertly told adventure, a ninety-nine-night quest that sends Marwand and his cousins across the landscape of Logar. Moving between celebrations and tragedies, deeply humorous and surprisingly tender, 99 Nightsin Logar is a vibrant exploration of the power of stories-the ones we tell each other, and the ones we find ourselves in.
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[On the thirty-secondmorning Budabash got free sometime in the night]***
(Penguin,8 January 2019, ebook, 288 pages, copy from publisher via NetGalley and voluntarily reviewed)
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Well, I'm not sure what to make of this one. I really liked some aspects of 99 Nights in Logar but many aspects just didn'twork for me. I'll start off with the negatives. I'm not sure if there were a formatting issue with my Kindle file but every line had a pink number on the left hand side which looked really weird and kept pulling my attention. Also there are massive gaps for no reason between chunks of text. There were also large chunks of Arabic script at the end which wasn't translated so this didn't impress me. And there are many non-English words un-translated and the meaning wasn't clear from the prose. Now, onto the good stuff. There isn't a lot. I've not really read a lot of books set in Afghanistan so I enjoyed reading about a vastly different culture and way of life. This was interesting. I liked the way Marwand reacts to being back in Afghanistan after being raised mostly in the US. The book is structured in a series of vignettes, some which are linked and some which stand alone. I liked this. 99Nights in Logar had potential but needs a lot of work.
