A richly informative but didactic tale about the clash of old and new in India.
An Indian activist and an American architect team up to take on an emerging right-wing movement in this debut novel.
Sompur, India. It’s 2005, and 30-year-old Meena Kaul is the director of Behera House, a women’s shelter with a mission to combat the country’s rampant domestic abuse. Meena is spearheading the building of a newer, larger campus for the organization, though this has caused some tension in her household, as her husband, Keshav Narayan—India’s leading sustainable architect—was passed over in favor of a Western designer. That Westerner is the American Simon Bliss, who is searching for redemption following an accident at one of his previous buildings. Dissatisfied with his own marriage, Simon becomes enamored with the brilliant and beautiful Meena before he even meets her. When an economic downturn causes Meena to lose her funding, she receives a proposal from an unexpected source. The right-wing Hindu Democratic Party offers a grant, though Meena suspects it is only doing so in order to gain traction among female voters ahead of a 2006 election. “There’s no way in hell we’re taking their dirty loot,” protests one of Meena’s staffers, “at least not while I’m here. It’s an ultra-right-wing cabal. If elected, they’ll destroy whatever progress we’ve made on women’s rights over the last hundred years.” Even so, Meena considers taking the deal. But Simon can see that they may be making a devil’s bargain. As it becomes clear that Behera’s patron, Madhav Behera—as well as Kesh—is increasingly in the pocket of the HDP, Simon and Meena must work to keep the shelter free from its grip—even if to do so means making enemies with some very powerful people.
Langer’s prose is lucid and wonderfully detailed, particularly when it comesto the architecture: “Suddenly four magnificent stone towers loomed ahead. Each façade consisted of vertical ribs curving inward and culminating in a mushroom-like stone cap. Deep horizontal spaces cut across the ribs, giving the impression that the tower was made up of a thousand sheets of paper, each suspended by a thin layer of air.” The novel does an excellent job showing the dangers faced by women in certain traditional societies as well as the platform and political strategies of the HDP. But in purely narrative terms, the book is a bit underwhelming. The plot moves quite slowly—as one might expect of a story that focuses on the less-than-thrilling world of non-governmental organization grants—and the romance at the center of it feels rather forced. Meena, the obvious protagonist of the tale, takes a back seat to Simon (and, to an extent, Kesh), diluting the work’s feminist message. Indeed, the very presence of Simon as a co-protagonist is perhaps a fatal flaw in the story’s conception. Readers will certainly learn a lot from this volume—Langer is extremely successful at bringing the time and place to vivid life—but beyond that sense of transportation, this is not much joy to be found here.
A richly informative but didactic tale about the clash of old and new in India.Pub Date: Oct. 25, 2020
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 327
Publisher: Dryad Press
Review Posted Online: June 11, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
One of the noblest characters in American literature gets a novel worthy of him.
Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as told from the perspective of a more resourceful and contemplative Jim than the one you remember.
This isn’t the first novel to reimagine Twain’s 1885 masterpiece, but the audacious and prolific Everett dives into the very heart of Twain’s epochal odyssey, shifting the central viewpoint from that of the unschooled, often credulous, but basically good-hearted Huck to the more enigmatic and heroic Jim, the Black slave with whom the boy escapes via raft on the Mississippi River. As in the original, the threat of Jim’s being sold “down the river” and separated from his wife and daughter compels him to run away while figuring out what to do next. He's soon joined by Huck, who has faked his own death to get away from an abusive father, ramping up Jim’s panic. “Huck was supposedly murdered and I’d just run away,” Jim thinks. “Who did I think they would suspect of the heinous crime?” That Jim can, as he puts it, “[do] the math” on his predicament suggests how different Everett’s version is from Twain’s. First and foremost, there's the matter of the Black dialect Twain used to depict the speech of Jim and other Black characters—which, for many contemporary readers, hinders their enjoyment of his novel. In Everett’s telling, the dialect is a put-on, a manner of concealment, and a tactic for survival. “White folks expect us to sound a certain way and it can only help if we don’t disappoint them,” Jim explains. He also discloses that, in violation of custom and law, he learned to read the books in Judge Thatcher’s library, including Voltaire and John Locke, both of whom, in dreams and delirium, Jim finds himself debating about human rights and his own humanity. With and without Huck, Jim undergoes dangerous tribulations and hairbreadth escapes in an antebellum wilderness that’s much grimmer and bloodier than Twain’s. There’s also a revelation toward the end that, however stunning to devoted readers of the original, makes perfect sense.
One of the noblest characters in American literature gets a novel worthy of him.Pub Date: March 19, 2024
ISBN: 9780385550369
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 16, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2024
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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