An absorbing, vivid look at Indian culture.
Fifteen linked short stories explore the lives of several Indian-Americans and a black high school student.
Set in the early 1990s, these stories circle back and forth among many different characters. Among them are Avi Sharma, a first-generation Indian-American and a school psychologist; the student he’s counseling, Yael Campbell, 16 and pregnant; Saya, Avi’s wife, a stay-at-home mom (or “Outraged mother and citizen,” as she signs a letter protesting a commercial’s waste of milk); Devu Sharma, a wealthy motelier, and his expensive, beautiful wife, Alisha; their daughter Rita, Saya’s cousin, who’s in love with Avi; and Devu’s stepsister, Rani, still living in India, among others. Many of the stories focus on characters finding their place in the world amid familial obligations; others deal with the power of memory. At one point, Rani recalls eating mango pickles with Devu: he would “pull aside the lid releasing the smell of spiced mustard oil into the air so heady he was afraid he’d pass out in excitement….We all have our own encounter with heaven. Eating stolen pickle was theirs.” Chawla, in her debut, portrays well-rounded characters whose different points of view usefully inform the collection as a whole. Alisha, for example, takes the power of her beauty almost for granted, although she worries about her figure; at the same time, her unkempt daughter Rita is becoming more confident as a woman—and they’re both attracted to the same young man. The author understands how families challenge and sustain their members, as when Avi, to please his father, agrees to listen to some old Jawaharlal Nehru speeches: “And father and son plucked an hour out of time, to be savored then stored in the cool, dark cellar of memory marked Private Reserve.” Only Yael’s teen-pregnancy story—sympathetic and well-told as it is—doesn’t quite fit, seeming to belong to another book entirely.
An absorbing, vivid look at Indian culture.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-0-98882210-8
Page Count: 207
Publisher: Pen-n-Mouse Press
Review Posted Online: April 8, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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