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UNDER THE LEMON TREES

Name: UNDER THE LEMON TREES
Author: Bhira Backhaus
ISBN: 978-0-312-37953-7

by Bhira Backhaus ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2009

A capable but too-quiet account of a community, missed opportunities for passion and family history.

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In this debut novel, a young Indian-American woman comes to an awareness of her family, her community and the extent to which her fate rests in her own hands.

It’s 1976 and Jeeto Rai is a high-school junior in Oak Grove, in central California’s orchard region. Her older sister, Neelam, has recently married a man her parents chose for her. Neelam’s real passion, however, is for Hari, grandson of community pillar Mohta Singh who was sent away when his tryst with Neelam, and her resulting pregnancy, was discovered. Mindful of her sister’s fate, Jeeto cautiously picks her way through her own forbidden desire for local bad boy Pritam. Also unknown to her parents, Jeeto is accepted at Berkeley, but the tug of history and tradition complicates her longing to leave Oak Grove. Similarly, her own looming arranged marriage both intrigues and scares her. As a first-person narrator, Jeeto functions largely as an observer of Oak Grove’s Sikh community—non-Indians, goras, figure only peripherally in Jeeto’s world—and its sometimes inscrutable mores. There are lots of kameezes and chunis and people named Singh who aren’t necessarily related. While some observations are finely drawn—the slight of offering a visitor only water, not tea—others seem superfluous. The writing is pretty but too often uniform: Even a husband’s abuse of his wife comes across as muted. Chapters that flash back to Jeeto’s uncle’s arrival in the United States and his own ill-fated love for a Mexican waitress provide the book’s most compelling narrative motion. That back story sheds some light on the present, although the secrets revealed fall short of momentous.

A capable but too-quiet account of a community, missed opportunities for passion and family history.

Pub Date: March 1, 2009

ISBN: 978-0-312-37953-7

Page Count: 336

Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2009

Categories:

FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP | GENERAL FICTION

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CARRIE

by Stephen King ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 8, 1974

King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these...

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Figuratively and literally shattering moments of hoRRRRRipilication in Chamberlain, Maine where stones fly from the sky rather than from the hands of the villagers (as they did in "The Lottery," although the latter are equal to other forms of persecution).

All beginning when Carrie White discovers a gift with telekinetic powers (later established as a genetic fact), after she menstruates in full ignorance of the process and thinks she is bleeding to death while the other monsters in the high school locker room bait and bully her mercilessly. Carrie is the only child of a fundamentalist freak mother who has brought her up with a concept of sin which no blood of the Lamb can wash clean. In addition to a sympathetic principal and gym teacher, there's one girl who wishes to atone and turns her date for the spring ball over to Carrie who for the first time is happy, beautiful and acknowledged as such. But there will be hell to pay for this success—not only her mother but two youngsters who douse her in buckets of fresh-killed pig blood so that Carrie once again uses her "wild talent," flexes her mind and a complete catastrophe (explosion and an uncontrolled fire) virtually destroys the town.

King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these youngsters who once ate peanut butter now scrawl "Carrie White eats shit." But as they still say around here, "Sit a spell and collect yourself."

Pub Date: April 8, 1974

ISBN: 0385086954

Page Count: 216

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1974

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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NEVER FLINCH
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YOU LIKE IT DARKER
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Appreciations: Carrie Turns 40

- SEEN & HEARD
Stephen King Used ‘Carrie’ Advance To Support Mom

- BOOK TO SCREEN
New ‘Carrie’ Series in the Works at Amazon

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TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

by Harper Lee ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 11, 1960

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A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.