Awkward and unsatisfying.
In her first novel for adults, Indian author Mukherjee (English/Hindu College, Delhi Univ.) explores how the past shapes the present.
As a young man, Sameer loved Abha. Abha wanted him to marry her friend, Vandana. Vandana married Sameer after she realized that she and David—an Englishman obsessed with India—had no future together. Vandana and David remained in the holy city of Varanasi; she became a social worker, he continued to study Indian religion, and both of them developed ties to a local ashram. Sameer and Vandana, both doctors, set up a thoroughly conventional upper-middle-class household—complete with son and daughter—in New Delhi. Old desires and new revelations disturb all their lives when a little boy born and raised in the ashram comes to live with the Sengupta family. By the time the reader understands what’s going on in this novel, she may be well past caring. The simplest, most basic pleasures that narrative has to offer is the gratification of finding out what happens next. This novel does not offer that. The story moves back and forth in time in a clumsy, haphazard fashion. Often, it takes awhile to figure out whether a scene is happening in the present or the past, which makes for a disorienting, off-putting read. That Mukherjee denies readers the simple satisfaction of a straightforward narrative would be forgivable if her meandering served a pleasing aesthetic end, but it does not, nor does she offer any of literature’s other joys. Her prose is stiff and clumsy. The dialogue, in particular, reads like it’s been translated into English by someone with a bilingual dictionary and no actual experience with the language.
Awkward and unsatisfying.Pub Date: July 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-230-00732-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Macmillan UK/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2007
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
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
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