A coming-of-age story set in early-20th-century India.
Two sisters’ personal lives get caught up in the changing politics of India in this historical novel.
Chandrapur, India. Sixteen-year-old Leela is training to become a teacher in the early 1900s, but she isn’t overly excited about her career, especially now that her betrothed, Nash, is coming home from Tokyo. He has studied engineering there the past three years, but due to the Russo-Japanese War, the British have ordered all Indian students to leave Japan. Her sister, 15-year-old Maya, is even more restless. “It’s a new world,” she says, dreaming of the end of school. “They have films now, and automobiles. Two years ago we never would have dreamt that we’d get a teacher training college. Two years from now the whole world may be unrecognizable. Why not dream up a place for ourselves within it?” When Nash returns, it is with a revolutionary zeal to unite Hindus and Muslims and throw off British rule—a zeal he attempts to spread to Leela and Maya. The sisters take his advice to try to merge the two girls’ schools—one Hindu, one Muslim. They bring the idea to Zainab, a Muslim colleague. But when Maya gets to know Zainab’s brother, Hassan, a Hindu-Muslim alliance that Leela did not bargain for takes root. Rohatgi’s (Fighting Cane and Canon, 2014) prose is measured and highly detailed, even when balancing the emotional lives of her characters. At one point, Leela narrates: “When Maya chews her cauliflower at dinner that night, her lips are exaggerated, her manner sullen and defiant. I can’t look at my father without feeling tears pool in my eyes, so I stare back at her as she tries to assess whether or not she should tell Papa everything.” The novel does an excellent job of placing readers directly into the politics of the time, highlighting the clash between old and new and between the region’s various subcultures. There are places where the plot drags a bit, but Leela and Maya are so carefully composed that readers will get caught up in this pivotal time in their young lives.
A coming-of-age story set in early-20th-century India.Pub Date: March 8, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-73323-329-3
Page Count: 270
Publisher: Galaxy Galloper Press, LLC
Review Posted Online: Nov. 29, 2019
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
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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