Review by Kevin Brown
This novel is the second (and possibly last) book in a series Shah began with While She Sleeps. It’s not necessary to have read the first novel to understand this one, though doing so would provide more depth and background on the world Shah has created. While She Sleeps focuses on life in The Green City (a fictional city in what seems to be Southwest Asia). Here, women have multiple husbands due to a nuclear war outside their country, which led to the Virus, which has led to women’s being unable to produce many children who survive. That novel focused on survival, especially for a small group of women who live in the Panah (sanctuary) underground. They serve as companions for the powerful men, not providing sex, but merely lying with the men until they fall asleep, offering an intimacy that has become absent from society.
In The Monsoon War, Shah focuses on resistance, as she moves the action to the mountains outside The Green City. This novel follows three different women—Alia, a wife to three husbands; Katy, a fighter in the Hamiyat (an all-female freedom fighter group); and Fatima Kara, a Commander of one of the Hamiyat units. Instead of merely surviving, these women find ways to try overthrowing the government, risking their lives in open rebellion (unlike the women of the Panah, who risked their lives in more subtle means of rebellion). In fact, all of the villages of the mountain have been quietly rebelling, as they raised their female daughters as male to avoid their being taken by the government and forced to be wives.
Shah points out in her acknowledgements that she drew on female fighters from Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, and Columbia for much of the inspiration for this work, but she also acknowledges that women throughout the world resist patriarchal domination in a variety of ways. Through this novel, she celebrates that diversity, while reminding readers the work of rebellion is far from done.
The Monsoon War by Bina Shah. Delphinium Books, May 2023.
Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels. Twitter @kevinbrownwrites