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I'm Booked!
By lynmiller-lachmann on 2009-09-02 18:43:14
After assigning as summer reading three books for young people on peace and human rights—We Are All Born Free, Every
Human Has Rights, and After Gandhi—in June, I tackled the stack of books and ARCs (advance reading copies) sitting on
my “to-read” shelf. And since I did very little this summer besides read books, edit MultiCultural Review, promote my
recently-published Gringolandia, and revise the first draft of my next novel, I’ve decided to use my posts this month to
highlight notable titles that have come across my desk. First up is the brand-new novel The Evolution of Shadows by debut
author Jason Quinn Malott. Until reading this book, I didn’t know much about the conflict in Bosnia beyond what I’d read in
news reports over the past 15 years, which would make me reasonably well informed but certainly no expert. Malott’s novel
portrayed the individuals behind the headlines—ordinary people caught up in the brutal ethnic cleansing that followed the
dissolution of Communist Yugoslavia—and the lingering legacy of those horrors. The Evolution of Shadows begins with a
recently wed Chinese-American woman, Lian Zhao, telling her husband she’s going on a business trip to London. She isn’t.
Instead, she’s meeting two other people in Sarajevo—an aging, alcoholic British photojournalist named Jack MacKenzie and
Emil Todorovic, a translator whose entire family of Bosnian Muslims died at the hands of the Serbs—with the exception of
one young cousin who lies blind, maimed, and paralyzed in a rundown hospital. Lian, Jack, and Emil were connected to an
American photographer, Gray Banick, who disappeared during the fighting five years earlier, and they have come to look for
his remains and closure to their relationships with him. Gray was Lian’s lover, but her traditional parents insisted that she
marry a Chinese-American doctor whom she does not love. For Jack, Gray was the son he never had, the protégé who
photographed horrors that even he could not bear. Among those subjects Gray photographed were the murdered members of
Emil’s family. Now the surviving cousin, who ran away at age 14 to fight for the Bosnian Muslim resistance, awaits in
darkness Gray’s return to keep a promise—to end his life if he ever became disabled. When the boy dies under mysterious
circumstances, there is hope that the presumed-dead Gray may still be alive. Malott’s novel is a sparely written and stark
depiction of three people and a nation confronting the horrors of war. We see the impact their work has on the
photographers’ personal lives, as Jack’s marriage disintegrates and Gray responds to Lian’s decision to marry the doctor with
a bizarre act of violence. The causes and consequences of a centuries-old conflict (for historical background, Ivo Andric’s
novel Bridge on the Drina, is a classic work) are revealed through deft storytelling and main characters that transcend their
ethnicities to become real people in all their complexity. The publisher of The Evolution of Shadows is an independent
literary press out of Denver, Unbridled Books. Because it is independently published, the novel comes to the market at a
huge disadvantage in relation to novels from the better-funded major publishers. Yet it is usually the indies that take a
chance on books that are more challenging, that address social and political issues, and that take place in countries that are
small and no longer in the news as is the case with Bosnia, Kosovo, and the other lands of the former Yugoslavia. But we
ignore these places and their conflicts at our own peril—in 1914 an assassination in Sarajevo sparked the First World War—
and stories like Malott’s are powerful and effective in bringing home the true costs of war. Postscript: I just found out that
The Evolution of Shadows will be available in bookstores on October 1. I suggest you reserve a copy today at your favorite
independent bookstore, and set aside time in your schedule to read it. |» frntcvrevolofshad
