REVIEW: Almost Surely Dead (book) by Amina Akhtar

Almost Surely Dead is a blend of thriller and supernatural horror. I got my copy of this book for free.

Review:

This is one of the freebies I got at the last Book Bonanza. (This is another one I finished a while back and should have reviewed sooner, or at least taken more notes on. My memories of it are a bit fuzzy.)

This alternates between true crime podcast snippets about Dunia Ahmed, a pharmacist in New York who went missing a year ago, flashbacks to Dunia's life not long before she disappeared, and flashbacks to Dunia when she was 5 years old. Part of what makes Dunia's disappearance so intriguing to the podcast's audience is that there were several unexplained attempts on her life just before she disappeared. For no apparent reason whatsoever, total strangers suddenly tried to kill Dunia and then committed suicide when they failed. Previously, the only thing causing Dunia problems was her ex, who kept sending her threatening messages, but the people who tried to kill her didn't seem to have any connection to Dunia's ex, or any other part of her life. Meanwhile, in the flashbacks to Dunia's childhood, we learn that she was prone to sleepwalking and that her mother once had an exorcism performed on her.  

What was going on with Dunia, and where is she now?

I didn't know anything about this book before going into it, except that it was a thriller. It was evident fairly early on that there would probably be supernatural elements, due to stuff going on with the first person who tried to kill Dunia. I was interested to see where things would go.

I kind of wish the book had leaned into its supernatural aspects even more than it did, or eased off on some of the other stuff going on in Dunia's life, because some of the things that were worked into the ending were just bonkers to imagine someone actually doing. There were also elements that I felt outstayed their welcome, like the podcast sections (I loathed the podcasters well before the end of the book, particularly when they shushed guests like Dunia's best friend for almost giving their audience "spoilers"). I found myself wishing this had been a bit more tightly written.

I read this while I was also reading Nadia Owusu's Aftershocks for my book club, and I found that the two works blended together weirdly well in my mind, even though Owusu's book is a memoir and Owusu's parents were Ghanaian and Armenian American, while Dunia's parents were Pakistani immigrants. Both Owusu and Dunia had complicated relationships with their mothers, lots of parental baggage, and fond memories of their fathers, who died when they were young. Dunia's story obviously went in a very different direction than Owusu's memoir, but it still amazed me how much overlap my mind found between them.