A romance between a woman from a poor, Southern family and a man from a large, close-knit, Indian immigrant clan sparks a clash that threatens to destroy the lives of three main characters in this debut novel.
Jenny Jenkins and Roshan Desai meet in dental school in Memphis and are simply good friends —until a graduation night celebration sends them into each other’s arms. Unfortunately, Roshan’s mother, Esha, who has a key to her son’s apartment, finds them together the next morning. Staring at Jenny, Esha says to her son, “Roshan, you need to take out the trash.” Jenny and Roshan go their separate ways only to reconnect after a decade, reigniting their passion; family chaos ensues. Each of the three characters has a life-altering back story, pieces of which are revealed along the way. Jenny becomes a successful dentist in Atlanta; Roshan agrees to a traditional, arranged marriage, but his dental practice is jeopardized by alcoholism and his lack of interest in his work. Esha is tortured by her son’s loveless and childless marriage but has learned to always maintain a public face of contentment: “If you tell a lie often enough, doesn’t it become the truth?” Jenny and Roshan are almost polar opposites. Jenny left home early to reinvent herself. She is independent and relentless in her pursuit of her career. Roshan is a rebel, but he’s constrained by tradition and various obligations to his widowed mother. He is both smothered and nourished by his family. Of these three fully developed characters, Esha is the most intriguing. Widowed when Roshan was 4 and thoroughly entrenched in Indian tradition, she gradually ventures out into mainstream society in search of purpose and reconciliation with her son. Parbhoo, a Southerner who is herself married to an Indian immigrant from South Africa, enriches the narrative with lavish descriptions of Indian food, dress, and family gatherings. And she has a wonderful eye for detail—at a celebration, Esha watches the younger women dancing: “The tiny mirrors on their flowing skirts created a swirl of colors, rotating in a circle.”
An impressive, culturally informative, and engaging love story filled with conflicts.Pub Date: Dec. 14, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-9982310-0-6
Page Count: 390
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
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Debut novel by hip-hop rap artist Sister Souljah, whose No Disrespect (1994), which mixes sexual history with political diatribe, is popular in schools country-wide. In its way, this is a tour de force of black English and underworld slang, as finely tuned to its heroine’s voice as Alice Walker’s The Color Purple. The subject matter, though, has a certain flashiness, like a black Godfather family saga, and the heroine’s eventual fall develops only glancingly from her character. Born to a 14-year-old mother during one of New York’s worst snowstorms, Winter Santiaga is the teenaged daughter of Ricky Santiaga, Brooklyn’s top drug dealer, who lives like an Arab prince and treats his wife and four daughters like a queen and her princesses. Winter lost her virginity at 12 and now focuses unwaveringly on varieties of adolescent self-indulgence: sex and sugar-daddies, clothes, and getting her own way. She uses school only as a stepping-stone for getting out of the house—after all, nobody’s paying her to go there. But if there’s no money in it, why go? Meanwhile, Daddy decides it’s time to move out of Brooklyn to truly fancy digs on Long Island, though this places him in the discomfiting position of not being absolutely hands-on with his dealers; and sure enough the rise of some young Turks leads to his arrest. Then he does something really stupid: he murders his wife’s two weak brothers in jail with him on Riker’s Island and gets two consecutive life sentences. Winter’s then on her own, especially with Bullet, who may have replaced her dad as top hood, though when she selfishly fails to help her pregnant buddy Simone, there’s worse—much worse—to come. Thinness aside: riveting stuff, with language so frank it curls your hair. (Author tour)
Pub Date: April 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-671-02578-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1999
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
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The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
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Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
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