This story about the second-class status of women in India doesn’t fully confront some of the issues it raises.
Mohanty’s debut novel tells the life story of a female born in India during the British occupation, following her to modern times while chronicling her struggles against male-dominated Indian culture.
Renuka was an atypical Indian girl. Born during 20th-century India’s era as Great Britain’s colony, the determined youth became a freedom fighter against the British, even though females were conditioned by Indian culture to accept a passive role in society. Renuka’s outspoken ways and vocal opinions on the second-class status of women caused her trouble when it came to marriage, career, and family. Because her first arranged marriage fell flat, she found the passive Shashank as a husband, but she still struggled against traditions and beliefs that kept Indian women oppressed. Among the community, one such attitude held that her husband’s family was cursed and that ill fortune would befall the women they married. Although Renuka managed to overcome this and became a successful businesswomen and feminist author preaching better treatment for Indian women, she was occasionally reminded as she went through life that the old ways were not really gone, specifically the methods by which her good friend Mandira also rose to power with “newly bloomed ambitions.” While the book’s title suggests a story about an evil curse, the narrative is actually a broadside against the poor treatment of Indian women by men. “It’s really unfortunate to be born as a female in this world,” says Papia, one of Renuka’s friends. The author knows Indian customs and traditions and writes with authority about both. Renuka is a well-characterized bundle of contradictions, capable one second of giving Shashank an ultimatum in an “icy-cold voice” and desiring sex with him in the next. Unfortunately, Shashank is so passive as to seem unrealistic. Mandira, who’s as ambitious as Renuka but without a Shashank-type husband, uses guile and cunning—like Indian men—to get what she wants, yet she’s portrayed as vile and duplicitous. Readers might conclude that only through luck—the fortune of a failed first arranged marriage—was Renuka able to succeed on her terms.
This story about the second-class status of women in India doesn’t fully confront some of the issues it raises.Pub Date: July 14, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4828-5108-3
Page Count: 200
Publisher: PartridgeIndia
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
A convicted killer’s list of five people he wants dead runs the gamut from the wife he’s already had murdered to franchise heroine Ali Reynolds.
Back in the day, women came from all over to consult Santa Clarita fertility specialist Dr. Edward Gilchrist. Many of them left his care happily pregnant, never dreaming that the father of the babies they carried was none other than the physician himself, who donated his own sperm rather than that of the handsome, athletic, disease-free men pictured in his scrapbook. When Alexandra Munsey’s son, Evan, is laid low by the kidney disease he’s inherited from his biological father and she returns to Gilchrist in search of the donor’s medical records, the roof begins to fall in on him. By the time it’s done falling, he’s serving a life sentence in Folsom Prison for commissioning the death of his wife, Dawn, the former nurse and sometime egg donor who’d turned on him. With nothing left to lose, Gilchrist tattoos himself with the initials of five people he blames for his fall: Dawn; Leo Manuel Aurelio, the hit man he’d hired to dispose of her; Kaitlyn Todd, the nurse/receptionist who took Dawn’s place; Alex Munsey, whose search for records upset his apple cart; and Ali Reynolds, the TV reporter who’d helped put Alex in touch with the dozen other women who formed the Progeny Project because their children looked just like hers. No matter that Ali’s been out of both California and the news business for years; Gilchrist and his enablers know that revenge can’t possibly be served too cold. Wonder how far down that list they’ll get before Ali, aided once more by Frigg, the methodical but loose-cannon AI first introduced in Duel to the Death (2018), turns on them?
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how little the boundary-challenged AI, who gets into the case more or less inadvertently, differs from your standard human sidekick with issues.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5101-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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