A well-developed and enchanting odyssey involving an apparition who ends up aiding the living.
Helping a spirit to find peace allows a woman to put to rest some of the ghosts in her own life in this debut novel.
Saaina’s fetching protagonist is Jaya, an overworked medical student and researcher in Nashville. Jaya had fled to the United States from her native India to escape her life of privilege and her suffocating family. She’s content with her busy lifestyle, although she develops a yearning for a place of her own. Jaya is drawn to a quaint fixer-upper in the suburbs, which she falls in love with. There is only one problem she hadn’t expected: It’s haunted. One night, she hears noises in a vacant room upstairs, and there, she discovers the diary of Tara, the house’s previous resident. Tara died of cancer, and the diary contains her bucket list, which she had been unable to complete. So Jaya decides to finish the list for Tara to help her spirit move on, with the support of the woman’s old neighbor Leo. At first, the tasks are simple, such as dating a man in uniform and singing karaoke. But she balks when she spots the item “solve a cold case.” In the midst of this crusade, Jaya rushes home to India when her beloved grandmother becomes ill. She also continues working on Tara’s list without realizing that the ghost has been guiding and assisting her all along. The most enjoyable part of Saaina’s novel is watching Jaya evolve from a somewhat self-involved woman to one who goes out of her way to help a perfect (albeit, dead) stranger. While doing so, Jaya gets reconnected to her extended family, which she had tried to leave behind. She even considers the previously unlikely possibility of getting married—to a childhood friend. Saaina, who’s also a native of India, successfully unveils that nation’s upper-caste society, a world unknown to many readers. The author skillfully weaves together seemingly disparate elements—Tara’s list, Jaya’s volunteer cancer research, an Indian cold case, and a charred psychiatric hospital—into a compelling narrative. Jaya’s selfless act results in her ultimately enjoying a fuller life.
A well-developed and enchanting odyssey involving an apparition who ends up aiding the living.Pub Date: Jan. 9, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5486-5862-5
Page Count: 362
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Feb. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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