THE PUKUR

An English girl discovers the meaning of family in a new place.

At the age of 12, Sophie Shepherd loses both her parents in a terrible car accident, ending up with her maternal aunt, uncle, and cousin. Sophie’s fiery side reveals itself when her uncle turns out to be abusive and a heavy drinker. While her sleep is filled with nightmares, her waking life turns into one when her horrid uncle abandons her in rural Bangladesh with Joshua, her estranged paternal uncle. Sophie finds life with her taciturn uncle, who clearly doesn’t want her there, unbearable, not to mention entering a strange school in a strange country. But she begins to look beyond her discomfort, tentatively making friends and understanding, despite her grief, that home can mean many things. There are productive ways to write about cultures—exploring problems while celebrating positives—and the novel attempts this but falls short in its portrayal of Bangladesh. As well as being framed as a backward country, sweeping, stereotypical statements about Bangladeshi people’s shortcomings are barely tempered by the positives. While the book picks up toward the middle, allowing Sophie to gradually grow in her perspective on her adopted country, there’s still a lot of predictable melodrama. It also takes her, a White English child, to rescue a Bangladeshi family in the face of a crisis. Unfortunately, the prose feels jerky when it intercuts between Sophie’s thoughts, which feel more adultlike than teen, and her reality.

An ambitious story that falls flat.