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THE INVITATION

Name: THE INVITATION
Author: Anne Cherian
ISBN: 978-0-393-08160-2

by Anne Cherian ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 14, 2012

A mostly entertaining, sometimes thoughtful, but not terribly demanding Indian beach read.

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After 25 years in the United States, four Indian friends living in California are forced to re-evaluate their lives in this novel about the costs and benefits of assimilation.

Vic, Frances, Jay and Lali, newly arrived from India, met as graduate students at UCLA. But while they may have been lumped together as Indian immigrants, they come from very different regions, religions and socio-economic classes, and those differences have shaped their experiences in America. Vic, from a poor farming community he was desperate to escape, has had the most financial success while remaining the least assimilated. He returned to India for an arranged marriage and is unhappy with how Americanized his wife has become. Now, to celebrate his older son’s graduation from MIT, Vic throws a grand Indian-style party at his Newport Beach home to which he invites Frances, Jay and Lali. Jay comes from an upper class Hindu family and seemed the golden boy in their UCLA circle; Frances, the daughter of middle class Catholics from Goa, felt lucky when they married. But UCLA was their highpoint. Jay has never risen above middle management; Frances struggles as a real estate agent during the economic downturn; and their 11th-grade daughter’s grades have plummeted. If Frances and Jay have chosen to live away from the Indian community in a largely Jewish neighborhood of Sherman Oaks, Lali has gone further afield. Originally from a Jacobite Syrian Christian community in the Indian city of Cochin, Lali now lives in San Francisco with her Jewish doctor husband, who has recently begun exploring his religious roots. Feeling isolated, Lali has drifted into an online flirtation with an Indian lover from her past. Once the friends gather, emotions flare, and secrets come to light. With the possible exception of Vic, these characters’ fallibilities only make them more likeable, particularly Jay and Frances, whose futures Cherian (A Good Indian Wife, 2008) disappointingly leaves the most unsettled.

A mostly entertaining, sometimes thoughtful, but not terribly demanding Indian beach read.

Pub Date: May 14, 2012

ISBN: 978-0-393-08160-2

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Norton

Review Posted Online: April 4, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2012

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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SUMMER ISLAND

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2001

The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...

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Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.

Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.

The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.

Pub Date: March 1, 2001

ISBN: 0-609-60737-5

Page Count: 336

Publisher: Crown

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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LAST ORDERS

by Graham Swift ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 5, 1996

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Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.