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sethdmichaels.bsky.social · @sethdmichaels.bsky.social@bridge.neodb.net

Rated A Brief History of Seven Killings 6/10

More impressive than enjoyable. It's a big, sprawling book, spreading out across three decades, multiple cities, more than a dozen narrators, all very convincingly illustrated with distinctive voices, and quite compelling at times - but it's not at all brief, and the disparate threads - all emerging from a (true, though heavily fictionalized) 1976 incident where a Jamaican criminal gang attempted to carry out a political assassination of Bob Marley - don't quite come together. It's a lot to take in, and the Jamaican patois with which many of the characters speaks takes some getting used to. I get why this book is a big deal and it's obviously an enormous achievement, pulled off at a high level of difficulty, it just didn't grab me as much as I was hoping.

#book

Published 2026-08-18 17:04 UTC · bridged from Atmosphere