This book is really well written, as one would expect from Dave Eggers, and also heart-rendingly sad and touching. <br /> <br /> It's a painful and painstaking look at the true life of a Sudanese refugee, a detailed personal glimpse at the kind of life that is usually just part of the flood of bad news statistics we see every day. <br /> <br /> Some of the most powerful moments in the book take place at the boundaries between the hellish and unfamiliar life of this boy in poverty-stricken and war-torn Africa and his new life in the &quot;developed world&quot; which is the kind of existence we're more familiar with. <br />

Moya is one of the great world contemporary novelists. This book is like candy with an iron fist wrapped around it, or something. What I mean by that is that it's very funny and entertaining in one sense, as we follow a narrator who is a somewhat cynical and sex-obsessed horndog writer from a nearby country who has taken a unique copy-editing job: he's working for the catholic church in Guatemala (the country is never named but I recognize names, like Rios Montt, the dictator who presided over some of the worst crimes against humanity during Guatemala's civil war) to look over their huge report on the massacres against the indigenous peoples during the recently ended civil war there. On his time off he's chasing tail, with mixed success, and drinking lots of beer.

This short novel is, even for Bolaño, very strange. The bulk of the story seems to take place as a sort of dream being dreamt by the narrator, all while she is dozing on the floor trapped in a bathroom at the university in Mexico City during the infamous government invasion of the campus in October 1968. <br/> <br/>This character and her ordeal is mentioned briefly in Bolaño's much lengthier book The Savage Detectives, as are several other characters, including his alter-ego Arturo Belano. The substance of Amulet, though, seems without very much cohesive plot, even, again, relative to other work by this author.