Bed Books And Beyond

The Association of Small Bombs (2016), Viking Books Pardon the pun, but I found Karan Mahajan's second novel,  The Association of Small Bombs , to be a bit of a dud. I'm going to chalk this up to two things: (1) the book came so heavily recommended that it inevitably failed to live up to the hype, and more importantly, (2) if you're going to write about -and thereby stake a claim to- a minority experience, maybe put a little more than cursory googling into your research. Neither disclaimer is a reflection on Mahajan's writing- which is equal parts richly indulgent and the model of restraint- but you can't stylize your way out of the burning trainwreck that is deconstructing the Muslim experience. Some throwaway lines and sentiments attributed to the Muslim characters are so familiar, so cliched, that you wonder if the author has based all his understanding of the conceptual landmine he is taking on not even on Right Wing media, but Hollywood fluff. I can only