This side device serves principally to get inside the girls’ heads but really only pays off once: when “Meat” (Agpaoa) in a wrenching monologue that’s powerfully performed, recounts her victimization and humiliation at an older-kids party. It does matter to the cop (Javier Guerrero) whose investigations of the assault of a high school boy and the disappearance of this Kalki person frame the entire story. The deeper into the story things go, the more it doesn’t matter whether Kalki’s an avatar or not.

Confrontational as she can be, they know she’s got their backs.ĭinga has the strut and the ‘tude down pat. Swaggering more like a rock god than a specter from beyond, Kalki is quickly dubbed a “badass” by the girls.

Whether it’s goading the girls, whom she caustically dubs “Betty” and “Meat,” into shoplifting comic books or shouting back at a Bollywood movie, Kalki has them in her rebellious spell. All intimations that Kalki is the final avatar of the Hindu deity Vishnu, making a cameo on Earth to eradicate evil, are either accepted without much pushback or apparently deemed unimportant. They scarcely question the appearance of the extraordinary Kalki (Farah Dinga), figuring she’s just a new girl at school. Kailey Agpaoa and Mikaela Rae Macias couldn’t be more surly, or more believable, as the high school friends contemptuous of authority, shunned by the campus “C-Cups” and yet much more vulnerable than they are willing to let on.

Chronicles of the avatar book 2