Ministry of Moral Panic by Amanda Lee Koe

Where love is mixed with nostalgia and the ability to know how to love more than once. It’s about young love lost and what could have been. They may contain spoilers so be warned!įlamingo Valley: It wasn’t too salacious of a first story to ease us into the collection. So, I’m not sure of how much use they would be to anyone but I’ve added them below for anyone who’s interested.

A lot of my notes contain something along the lines of “I’m not sure what this story means”. While I read the book, I wrote down my thoughts so that I could remember each story better and how I felt about it. Some of the stories did leave an impression on me, and the questions it raised about human nature are worth pondering over. The book forced me to confront my internal biases, my discomforts and my beliefs surrounding unconventional relationships, illicit or not. While this book is definitely slightly out of my comfort zone, I’m glad for the SingLit connection which exposed me to different perspectives and genres.

It’s hard to say for sure how much I enjoyed the collection as a whole. There is an interesting mix of styles as some of the stories have elements of magical realism but some of them are completely rooted in reality. The stories are arguably provocative, containing overt explorations of sexuality as well as illicit relationships. Each story in this collection follows different characters and their often controversial relationships. From the title, I had assumed it was about Singapore in crisis and a cabinet scrambling to address the problem. I didn’t realise it was a collection of short stories until I started the novel. (Goodness, I didn’t know it was such an old release, I thought it was published maybe 4 years ago max.) I saw this book in the newspaper and on the shelves at Kinokuniya, and it was often mentioned in articles about SingLit, especially now during Singapore’s National Reading Movement.

Singapore literature! I’d seen this novel a lot in various places ever since it was released in 2013.

Ministry of Moral Panic by Amanda Lee Koe