![]() With the help of a fleshed-out cast of supporting characters who often contradict the negative views she holds of herself, Sneha gradually comes to recognize that community and solidarity are the way to survive life’s sling and arrows. ![]() Mathews skillfully navigates a slow-blossoming social and political awareness in the young Sneha, who angrily asks, “How was anyone expected to dream loftily about the future when the present ground them down to powder and nothingness?” Despite trying to do everything right, she and her friends and family are faced, again and again, with injustice, petty tyranny, state violence, aggressions on both a micro and macro level. ![]() Sneha, the sometimes prickly female narrator, reflects on the state of her own life in mid-recession Milwaukee and the lives of those she grows to love. In her novel All This Could Be Different, Sarah Thankam Mathews takes a stab at that reckoning. 9/11, repeated economic collapses, wars and fights over culture and identity, the encroaching existential threat of climate disaster in our lifetimes it seems a new mortal terror develops every few years, and many a “millennial novel” has attempted to reckon with that feeling of dread that hums in the background, warning you that something is wrong. ![]() To be a millennial is to be confronted, constantly, with the knowledge that things are not going well. ![]()
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