Flipping Through Pages #30 - Milkman (A Book Review)

“People always said you'd better be careful. Though how, when things are out of your hands, when things were never really in your hands, when things are stacked against you, does a person - the little person down here on the earth - be that?”

You get curious when you think of the lives you never lived. Of the Days you never touched. And of the people you never had to mourn.

Anna goes into the heart of the struggle of a nation and sees it through the eyes of a girl becoming a woman, and learning her place in a social structure filled the wrong way up. And making things right when everything else has gone so very wrong.

So, who is the Milkman? Nothing more than a social stigma, that society is only too happy to use to demean and disregard individuals who step out of line.

One of the more intriguing things the author has done is to create a wonderfully oppressive atmosphere, that while local and personal in origin, is global in its sense of dread. What does one conform to? Especially in a land where conformity is the rule and gossip tends to spread creating havoc for impressionable minds.

There’s a weird balance attempted between daily life and the climate where everything occurs. That is where the major failing occurs, as the characters themselves masked in what becomes caricature beyond the protagonist lend themselves to insipid conversations that fail to contribute to the story or even develop dimensions to nameless faces.

While the style of writing is interesting in its experimental continuous nature, reflecting how we keep on evolving and endangering in our thoughts – it fails to serve a purpose in becoming appealing in its strange banality.

There’s too much noise to decipher through, and by the end you feel like you have gone through the struggles and a journey into maturity of a 18 year old girl, but all you are left with in absolute is the haunting thought of having survived a storm that only took from you, without giving much back.

So I give it 6 out of 10.

+Interesting exploration of themes
+An intriguing writing style

-Caricature cast
-Devolves too much into banal misdirection