A thought-provoking dissection of a modern India, though one with an unsatisfying conclusion.
Swarup (Six Suspects, 2009, etc.) intrigues and mystifies with a tale from the great colossus that's modern-day India.
Swarup debuted with Q & A, which became the hit film Slumdog Millionaire. Here, he leaves Mumbai’s poor behind and joins a middle-class, well-educated Delhi family in extremis. Once again, it’s 21st-century India—cellphones, industrial bounty, ambitious consumerism—overlaid on a patriarchal rural society plagued by abuse and forced marriage. There may be satire here, but it’s gentle and empathetic. With their ailing mother, sisters Sapna and Neha Sinha, new to Delhi, reside in "the colony," a vast apartment complex. Neha lusts after Bollywood. To support the family and Neha’s university education, Sapna, English degree in hand, clerks in an electronics store. At a shrine to Goddess Durga, she encounters Vinay Mohan Acharya, owner of the billion-dollar ABC Group; out of the blue, Acharya says he wants her to be ABC’s new CEO. There is, however, a matter of seven life tests. And thus begins Sapna’s journey, a meditation on money, ambition and fame in an arena where ancient socioethical values are under siege. In this new India, "Hope is a recreational drug," but everyone knows "their destinies are no longer fettered by a morass of caste and class." Characters are lively: Neha is the perfect Indian valley girl; Nirmala Ben is a widow, "quite possibly the world’s only Gandhian kleptomaniac," who goes on a hunger strike against a corrupt conglomerate; Karan, beguiling and gentle, is first Sapna’s crush then her supportive gay friend until his wicked secret is revealed. As relevant back story unfolds about her father’s death and another sister’s suicide, Sapna passes Acharya’s tests, but what she gains is self-knowledge rather than wealth; unfortunately, this thoughtful conclusion is soon oddly framed by two murders, one years ago and the other current.
A thought-provoking dissection of a modern India, though one with an unsatisfying conclusion.Pub Date: July 8, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-250-04555-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: June 4, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
A convicted killer’s list of five people he wants dead runs the gamut from the wife he’s already had murdered to franchise heroine Ali Reynolds.
Back in the day, women came from all over to consult Santa Clarita fertility specialist Dr. Edward Gilchrist. Many of them left his care happily pregnant, never dreaming that the father of the babies they carried was none other than the physician himself, who donated his own sperm rather than that of the handsome, athletic, disease-free men pictured in his scrapbook. When Alexandra Munsey’s son, Evan, is laid low by the kidney disease he’s inherited from his biological father and she returns to Gilchrist in search of the donor’s medical records, the roof begins to fall in on him. By the time it’s done falling, he’s serving a life sentence in Folsom Prison for commissioning the death of his wife, Dawn, the former nurse and sometime egg donor who’d turned on him. With nothing left to lose, Gilchrist tattoos himself with the initials of five people he blames for his fall: Dawn; Leo Manuel Aurelio, the hit man he’d hired to dispose of her; Kaitlyn Todd, the nurse/receptionist who took Dawn’s place; Alex Munsey, whose search for records upset his apple cart; and Ali Reynolds, the TV reporter who’d helped put Alex in touch with the dozen other women who formed the Progeny Project because their children looked just like hers. No matter that Ali’s been out of both California and the news business for years; Gilchrist and his enablers know that revenge can’t possibly be served too cold. Wonder how far down that list they’ll get before Ali, aided once more by Frigg, the methodical but loose-cannon AI first introduced in Duel to the Death (2018), turns on them?
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how little the boundary-challenged AI, who gets into the case more or less inadvertently, differs from your standard human sidekick with issues.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5101-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
A terrifying page-turner with the complexities of fatherhood at its core.
The serial killer who terrorized a small British town by kidnapping and murdering five little boys has been locked up for over a decade. So who could have taken 6-year-old Neil Spencer?
"The first forty-eight hours following a disappearance are the most crucial." And yet one of those hours has gone by the time Neil's separated parents realize he never made it from his father's house to his mother's, a short walk he took alone. One of the main investigators of the crime is DI Pete Willis, who cracked a similar case years back and has never quite recovered from it, especially since one of the missing boys was never found. Is there an accomplice still on the loose? As Willis and his colleagues comb the town for clues about the disappearance, a recently widowed novelist and his young son move into what they don't yet know is called "the scary house." Jake is a bright but isolated child who has relied heavily on an imaginary friend and a Packet of Special Things for comfort since he came home from school one day to find his mother's lifeless body at the foot of the stairs. This move is meant to be a much-needed fresh start for the grieving and bewildered father and son, but from the start nothing goes right. On Jake's first day at his new school, the other children draw him into discussion about the missing boy and the Whisper Man who took him. Soon enough, Jake hears whispering too. North's novel pits nasty men submerged in evil against decent men struggling to do good; several father-son pairs reflect the challenges and darker possibilities of this relationship, though plotlines involving female characters are a bit undeveloped.
A terrifying page-turner with the complexities of fatherhood at its core.Pub Date: Aug. 20, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-31799-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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