Instructive historical fiction, even if it views its subject through rose-colored glasses.
Wagner-Wright’s debut novel focuses on a long-forgotten Indian social reformer.
In the Hindu epic, the Mahabharata, the young warrior Abhimanyu penetrates the enemy’s complex battlefield formation but gets trapped on his way out of it. Abhimanyu’s “Chakravyuh,” or labyrinth, might well be a metaphor for the life of Pandita Ramabai “Rama” Sarasvati, an independent-minded Indian woman born in the 19th century who faced numerous obstacles in her quest to find her true calling. In a society in which caste dictated one’s life path, young Rama was fortunate on two counts: she was born a Brahmin, and her father, Ananta Shastri, was a Sanskrit scholar who firmly believed in women’s education. The young Rama’s study of Hindu religious texts only raises more questions, and the answers she receives are far from satisfactory. Unfortunately, she has more pressing concerns when she loses several family members to famine and disease. Wagner-Wright explores Rama’s coming-of-age as she learns to navigate rigid societal mores while making a life for herself and her daughter, Mano. Initially finding refuge in India’s secular social institution, Brahmo Samaj, Rama discovered hypocrisy there, too. After traveling to Britain and the United States as a distinguished scholar of Sanskrit, she eventually found succor in Christianity and returned to India to set up a school for young widows and the underprivileged. The fruits of her labors still operate in India today, although she had to overcome a labyrinth of doubters and bureaucracy to make it happen. Wagner-Wright’s novel is an informative exploration of one of history’s many forgotten heroines. However, with historical fiction, it’s sometimes difficult to separate fact from invention, and some readers might find Rama’s ready dismissal of Hinduism and the Brahmo Samaj to be a tad too easy and glib. The pacing also suffers at times in this long work, particularly near the beginning, when the Shastri family’s peregrinations from town to town become tedious and repetitive. Also, the relentless, starry-eyed focus on Rama becomes claustrophobic and doesn’t adequately place her story against the larger historical context. As a result, some elements of the country’s history remain largely under wraps.
Instructive historical fiction, even if it views its subject through rose-colored glasses.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-9963845-1-3
Page Count: 542
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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