Novelist Karan Mahajan took to Twitter to object to a New York Times review of Jamil Jan Kochai’s The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories.

Author Elliot Ackerman (Green on Blue) gave Kochai’s book, which focuses on the lives of Afghans and Afghan Americans, a tepid review, writing, “Too many of the stories lean heavily on unconventional form to create intrigue, a reliance that can come at the expense of substance.” (By contrast, a critic for Kirkus gave the collection a starred review, calling it “stunning, compassionate, flawless.”)

Ackerman, an ex-Marine, complained that the book’s American characters “are broadly painted imperialists.” He also wrote, “Kochai also has a distracting fixation on whiteness. When he wants to signal characters are generically bad, he describes them as white; all the characters from the U.S. military—a remarkably diverse institution in reality—are described as ‘a small clan of white boys.’”

Mahajan (The Association of Small Bombs) responded on Twitter, writing, “To be a writer of color is to not be seen as a writer. When I read @JamilJanKochai's new collection I encountered a blazing, hybrid prose style; endlessly inventive storytelling; furious magic realism. The white ex-Marine reviewer in @nytimesbooks saw only an attack on whiteness.”

“All the more hilarious because the collection is *entirely* about Afghans; a white character occupies, like 3, pages out of 300 (and is depicted well),” he added. “But if you’re a member of an occupying force, like the Marine reviewer, that’s the person whose reality matters most.”

Mahajan went on to say that he doesn’t object to all negative reviews, but that he thinks reviewers should “check their biases.”

“I’ve never felt this way about a review, but the combo of imperialist viewpoint + disproportionate attention to 3 pages + fact errors makes me think @nytimesbooks should withdraw this review,” he wrote.

Michael Schaub, a journalist and regular contributor to NPR, lives near Austin, Texas.