Thought Train to Pusan

CBR11 Bingo Square: Travel Now perhaps the characters in this story don’t journey far beyond their city (though they do end up in the outskirts) and largely travel within it in a physical sense, but this novel also includes a journey to an unseen world of djinn, and therefore I picked it for the Travel square for CBR bingo. Alif the Unseen centers around a young hacker who goes by the pseudonym Alif, in an unnamed city along the Persian Gulf. This city is a security state, and he provides services to any dissidents who want to speak freely. After getting tangled up in a bit of a mess with a woman, and creating a program that can identify people’s digital footprints, he finds himself in trouble not just romantically, but now with a Prince who goes by the alias of The Hand, who seeks to imprison those who speak against the state. On the run with his neighbour, Dina, who accidentally gets caught up in everything, and with nowhere to hide, Alif finds himself se...

CBR11 Bingo: Far and Away Although this novel could be used for a number of different bingo squares, I chose it for Far and Away, as it is far away from me in not just physical location, but also in time-period and culture. The Bird King takes place in 1491 Granada, at the end of reign of the last Sultan on the Iberian peninsula, as the Spanish Inquisition closes in on the once large, but now dwindling empire. The main focus is on the journeys of Fatima, a young concubine of the Sultan’s, and her best friend Hassan, the palace mapmaker with a special gift that allows him to see places he’s never been to, or create passages that were not there before. But with an emissary of Christian Spaniards coming to the palace, Hassan’s gift is seen as sorcery, resulting in he and Fatima fleeing. From there we see a story of quick learning and necessity to grow in many ways after being held in a certain life for so long, the instincts of survival, the concept of what it...