An Indian-American variation on a stock tearjerker plot, saved by the author's eye for detail.
A preteen girl stumbles across a host of dark family secrets on a visit to her parents’ native India.
Nair’s debut novel opens with its 20-something narrator, Rakhee, leaving her fiancé a note saying she must hustle back to India to resolve a family issue. The story that follows explains her rush, flashing back to when she was 10 and describing the emotionally charged summer she spent at her mother’s bustling family homestead. When she first arrived with her mother, the scorching heat was a striking contrast to the chilly winters back home in Minnesota. But while she initially misses her father and the conveniences of American life, she’s soon comforted by the extended family, especially her three female cousins. From there, things quickly grow complicated: Aunts and uncles are squabbling over the rights to manage the homestead and the family-run hospital, while her mother appears to have rekindled her romance with a childhood crush. The starkest evidence that the family is fraying is a discovery Rakhee makes when she ventures past the property: a cottage occupied by Tulasi, a young girl whose facial deformation prompted her parents to care for her but hide her away. Nair gently packs the story with plenty of commentary about Indian domestic life, mythology and, most of all, its sexist culture—throughout the summer, Rakhee learns how restricted women are in marriage, property ownership and, as Tulasi proves, the right to a public existence. Ultimately, that gives the book the shape of a melodrama, which grows overheated in its climactic scenes. But if the final chapters are driven by familiar conflicts, charming individual moments are sprinkled throughout. Scenes in which Rakhee observes her mother’s guilt over betraying her husband reveal the girl’s growing emotional acuity, and Rakhee’s relationship with Tulasi is elegantly turned, conveying a sense of magic that comes with children having a space to share secrets without neglecting the sinister circumstances that locked Tulasi away.
An Indian-American variation on a stock tearjerker plot, saved by the author's eye for detail.Pub Date: June 15, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-446-57268-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: April 6, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2011
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these...
Figuratively and literally shattering moments of hoRRRRRipilication in Chamberlain, Maine where stones fly from the sky rather than from the hands of the villagers (as they did in "The Lottery," although the latter are equal to other forms of persecution).
All beginning when Carrie White discovers a gift with telekinetic powers (later established as a genetic fact), after she menstruates in full ignorance of the process and thinks she is bleeding to death while the other monsters in the high school locker room bait and bully her mercilessly. Carrie is the only child of a fundamentalist freak mother who has brought her up with a concept of sin which no blood of the Lamb can wash clean. In addition to a sympathetic principal and gym teacher, there's one girl who wishes to atone and turns her date for the spring ball over to Carrie who for the first time is happy, beautiful and acknowledged as such. But there will be hell to pay for this success—not only her mother but two youngsters who douse her in buckets of fresh-killed pig blood so that Carrie once again uses her "wild talent," flexes her mind and a complete catastrophe (explosion and an uncontrolled fire) virtually destroys the town.
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these youngsters who once ate peanut butter now scrawl "Carrie White eats shit." But as they still say around here, "Sit a spell and collect yourself."Pub Date: April 8, 1974
ISBN: 0385086954
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1974
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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