Book review of How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder by Nina McConigley

How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder is a powerhouse. It’s a bracing story of abuse and protection bolstered by virtuosic writing that is simultaneously spare and poetic, subtle and brutal.

At the center of this striking literary debut are two Catholic schoolgirls, the daughters of an Indian mother and a white American father who works on oil rigs and is rarely home. It’s the 1980s, and Georgie and Agatha are isolated and slightly adrift in their starkly white rural Wyoming town. The girls chafe at how their heritage makes them feel like outsiders. They’re perceived as immigrants even though they’re American born, and are raised by a woman who was herself a conflicted colonial subject of the British Empire, resenting the partition of her birthland while admiring everything British. Their mother named them after two of England’s literary icons: the narrator, Georgie, “Georgette Ayyar” after Georgette Heyer, and her elder sister “Agatha Krishna” after Agatha Christie.

Though only tweens, Georgie and Agatha understand difference and cultural contradiction. Georgie makes it plain: “If you’re wondering what the big deal is . . . it’s brownness. It’s being the Other. It’s having to perform. It’s what happens when people are split, when countries are split. I have been performing forever.” And yet, in spite of all this, Georgie and Agatha live mostly ordinary lives—until their mother’s brother Vinod, “Vinny Uncle,” and his wife and son move from India into their small house.

Georgie and Agatha want the invaders gone, and not because they now have to share a bedroom. With Vinny Uncle around, they aren’t safe in their home or in their bodies. But if they tell their lonely mother about the abuse, their relatives will leave and she will be without company again. The two sisters are teetering on the hard edge of adolescence, “flowering trees, waiting for someone to cut our branches.” Instead of allowing themselves to continue being subject to harm, they take action. Like the cheerleader chants Agatha later practices at night, they decide to “be aggressive” in saving themselves.

The murder is foretold in the title, but the real mystery of How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder lies in what will happen next. Addictive and formidable, Nina McConigley’s novel demands to be devoured in a single sitting but will stay on your mind long after you put it down.