THE YEAR OF MY INDIAN PRINCE

A fictionalized memoir of a young girl’s romance with an exotic Indian Prince while seeking a cure for her tuberculosis in a sanitarium in 1946. The heroine, April, is a gorgeous California girl living in San Francisco and used to swimming on the swim team and in the ocean. She receives flowers as her due, sex is limited to kisses and embraces, and the culture clash is nonexistent. Based largely on the author’s experience, the daily details of life in the hospital are vivid and have a substance that the characters do not. Ravi, the prince, is not homesick enough to convey any sense of the place he’s left behind, and April’s roommates seem like stock characters, not real people facing death. Occasionally, there are glimpses behind the rosy hue that colors the narrative, such as a dinner with Ravi and his father that ends abruptly, a few references to a mother in a psychiatric hospital for her depression, and a sneaky visit to a crematorium where April is shut into the cold furnace. The seriousness of tuberculosis and the likelihood of death for all the patients are gradually understood, but never overshadow the light romance. Mostly the young men admire and court April who languishes in bedrest with little to occupy her mind. There is equally little here to occupy the readers, but for romance lovers there is a certain charm in the unique setting. (Fiction. 10-14)