Reviewed by Zach Sampinos“It's what it's all about—can you sit still on fire? Can you be there when it's all a horrific, beautiful, comedy?” Veselka's response to her title and why she chose it. The word zazen, defined as sitting meditation, expands into something both serene and terrifying in this book. Della, the unlikely narrator, paleontology scholar, and part time waitress, has had it with her city, with its ineffective counter-culture running in circles, its box mall churches cropping up all over, and its semi-regular bombings.
The book screams the way only honest fiction can, yelling at us: Hey! You're stepping deeper into the mouth of Hell, are you sure you can't be dissuaded? Zazen pokes fun at superficiality, impish iconoclasm, and our hardwired ways of turning the other cheek and continually not reaching out. It's also a novel about family, and what it means to love and be loved.
In-between serving tofu scramble and celebrating her deceased sister's life and juggling with her own identity, Della starts calling in bomb threats. It begins innocently, with prepaid phones and dubious targets, but it quickly escalates into something a little too real. Della's plan however flawed, is one that you just can not easily ignore.
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