Lalwani’s impressive debut exhibits deep empathy for her characters’ cultural and emotional displacements.
Excruciating ordeal of a math prodigy pressured by her father to enter Oxford.
Rumi is the daughter of Shreene and Mahesh Vasi, Indian immigrants to Cardiff, Wales. Ever since her first elementary-school teacher heralded Rumi’s gift for mathematics, Mahesh, a lecturer at the University of Wales, has been grooming his child for academic stardom. After a perceived snub by the local Mensa chapter, Mahesh designs a grueling study schedule for Rumi that occupies all her free time and enhances her isolation from her “normal” peers. As she crams for her college entrance exams—while a freshman in high school—Rumi, unbeknownst to her traditionalist parents, nurses some teenage crushes and accompanying heartaches. First there’s Bridgeman, a chess-club and stamp-collecting geek, who undergoes a growth and “cool” spurt seemingly overnight. During a trip to India, a Bollywood-handsome cousin flirts with her by night then, for fear of his own parents, ignores her by day. Rumi’s enforced regime causes her to develop some compensatory tics. As a child, she shoplifts sweets. As a teenager, she devours epic quantities of cumin seeds. But mostly her interior life is a seething cauldron of hormones and humiliation. Her developing puberty is viewed with alarm by her parents, who won’t tolerate premarital friendships with boys. Nevertheless, Mahesh thrusts Rumi into the sophisticated, diverse ambience of Oxford, if only for two days a week, under the chaperonage of an Indian landlady. Her math diligence derailed by her longing for masculine attention, Rumi sneaks out of a child-prodigy convention to attend a campus party where she encounters Fareed. Their mutual infatuation screeches to a halt when Fareed learns, through the plentiful press on Rumi, that she’s only 15. But when Mahesh, whose family was devastated by Muslim violence during Partition, finds Rumi’s love notes to a Muslim, his roles as mentor and Hindu paterfamilias collide, risking the violent sundering of his own fragile hearth.
Lalwani’s impressive debut exhibits deep empathy for her characters’ cultural and emotional displacements.Pub Date: Sept. 18, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6648-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet...
Four Chicago sisters anchor a sharp, sly family story of feminine guile and guilt.
Newcomer Lombardo brews all seven deadly sins into a fun and brimming tale of an unapologetically bougie couple and their unruly daughters. In the opening scene, Liza Sorenson, daughter No. 3, flirts with a groomsman at her sister’s wedding. “There’s four of you?” he asked. “What’s that like?” Her retort: “It’s a vast hormonal hellscape. A marathon of instability and hair products.” Thus begins a story bristling with a particular kind of female intel. When Wendy, the oldest, sets her sights on a mate, she “made sure she left her mark throughout his house—soy milk in the fridge, box of tampons under the sink, surreptitious spritzes of her Bulgari musk on the sheets.” Turbulent Wendy is the novel’s best character, exuding a delectable bratty-ness. The parents—Marilyn, all pluck and busy optimism, and David, a genial family doctor—strike their offspring as impossibly happy. Lombardo levels this vision by interspersing chapters of the Sorenson parents’ early lean times with chapters about their daughters’ wobbly forays into adulthood. The central story unfurls over a single event-choked year, begun by Wendy, who unlatches a closed adoption and springs on her family the boy her stuffy married sister, Violet, gave away 15 years earlier. (The sisters improbably kept David and Marilyn clueless with a phony study-abroad scheme.) Into this churn, Lombardo adds cancer, infidelity, a heart attack, another unplanned pregnancy, a stillbirth, and an office crush for David. Meanwhile, youngest daughter Grace perpetrates a whopper, and “every day the lie was growing like mold, furring her judgment.” The writing here is silky, if occasionally overwrought. Still, the deft touches—a neighborhood fundraiser for a Little Free Library, a Twilight character as erotic touchstone—delight. The class calibrations are divine even as the utter apolitical whiteness of the Sorenson world becomes hard to fathom.
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet another pleasurable tendril of sisterly malice uncurls.Pub Date: June 25, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54425-2
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: March 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
Finding positivity in negative pregnancy-test results, this depiction of a marriage in crisis is nearly perfect.
Named for an imperfectly worded fortune cookie, Hoover's (It Ends with Us, 2016, etc.) latest compares a woman’s relationship with her husband before and after she finds out she’s infertile.
Quinn meets her future husband, Graham, in front of her soon-to-be-ex-fiance’s apartment, where Graham is about to confront him for having an affair with his girlfriend. A few years later, they are happily married but struggling to conceive. The “then and now” format—with alternating chapters moving back and forth in time—allows a hopeful romance to blossom within a dark but relatable dilemma. Back then, Quinn’s bad breakup leads her to the love of her life. In the now, she’s exhausted a laundry list of fertility options, from IVF treatments to adoption, and the silver lining is harder to find. Quinn’s bad relationship with her wealthy mother also prevents her from asking for more money to throw at the problem. But just when Quinn’s narrative starts to sound like she’s writing a long Facebook rant about her struggles, she reveals the larger issue: Ever since she and Graham have been trying to have a baby, intimacy has become a chore, and she doesn’t know how to tell him. Instead, she hopes the contents of a mystery box she’s kept since their wedding day will help her decide their fate. With a few well-timed silences, Hoover turns the fairly common problem of infertility into the more universal problem of poor communication. Graham and Quinn may or may not become parents, but if they don’t talk about their feelings, they won’t remain a couple, either.
Finding positivity in negative pregnancy-test results, this depiction of a marriage in crisis is nearly perfect.Pub Date: July 17, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-7159-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: April 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2018
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