Gage beautifully describes the waters that evoke the transformative moments of Maya’s journey. Yet Parvati, the...
Can goddesses walk among us? Can an entire family really be cursed? Can a modern woman find her inner goddess?
In her debut novel (following her 2005 memoir North of Ithaka), Gage tells the tale of Maya Das. She has it all: a promising career in psychiatry, a family chock-full of successful physicians, a supportive best friend and a loving boyfriend. So why can't she manage to introduce her white boyfriend, Scott, to her Indian family? With her best friend, Heidi, and her residency-required therapist urging her to commit to her relationship and introduce him to the family, Maya is poised to assert her own independence. Yet the death of Dadiji, Maya's grandmother, far away in India, sets in motion not only some soul-searching but also a possible family curse. As a child visiting India, Maya had witnessed a father beating his daughter, dressed as a goddess and forced to beg on the streets. Maya begged her grandmother to intervene with the surprising result that the young girl was brought into Dadiji's home. Raised as a sort of servant slash inferior daughter, Parvati makes Maya and her older sister, Priya, uncomfortable. Indeed, Maya continues to wonder well into adulthood whether Parvati might actually be a goddess or have supernatural powers. Of course these wonderings conflict with her modern medical training, not to mention her family's practical approach to life. So when Maya's father discreetly calls to tell her Parvati has cursed the family, Maya is both dismissive and afraid. After her father's heart attack, her mother's hemorrhage, her sister's miscarriage, her brother's marital strife and her own personal and professional difficulties, however, Maya begins to take the curse much more seriously. A quest to India is in order. The journey offers Maya the chance not only to lift the family curse but also to assess her life, particularly her relationship with Scott and her own attitude towards her ethnicity.
Gage beautifully describes the waters that evoke the transformative moments of Maya’s journey. Yet Parvati, the curse-caster, remains mysteriously underdeveloped. A lovely read, but a missed opportunity to delve deeply into the superstitions that still lurk in our modern minds.Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-312-65851-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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