Your Heart Is a Muscle the Size of a Fist is a novel by Sunil Yapa.
Set in a single day during the protest in Seattle of the WTO conference, the story follows seven characters. The main character is Victor, a 19 year old who ran away from home three years ago after the death of his mother. His father is the police chief who is in charge of countering the protestors. There are two police officers, one who had been involved in the Oklahoma City bombing and the other who was in Los Angeles for the Rodney King riots.
Victor is returned after traveling the world and looking to score marijuana sales from the protestors. In an altercation, an organizer King comes into contact with Victor. He will join her protest. Another organizer, her lover John Henry, is locked in chain and PVC pipe along with Victor to keep an intersection blocked and prevent delegates from reaching the convention center for the meetings.
The final character is the finance minister of Sri Lanka who attempts to walk to the convention center for his meeting with President Clinton to gain admittance of his country in the WTO.
Having the perspective of all of these people as they interact and engage in the same events provides the reader the range of conflicting emotions and intentions of those involved.
Some information became redundant, such as Victor’s being gone travelling the world for three years, which was mentioned a half dozen times. There were periods of information dump or lecture on how the world of finance and politics worked.
The biggest challenge was whether or not I could feel enough for any one character to care what happened to them in the end. Seven is a lot of people and I never felt that I got into any given one enough to ‘pull’ for them in the end.
Ross Raymond Nunamaker 