A heart-wrenching coming-of-age tale in which survival depends more on compassion than rebellion.
Sixteen-year-old Indian-American Deep Singh is at a crossroads. Well, several crossroads, actually.
Can he surrender to his immigrant parents’ wishes, get a good job, submit to an arranged marriage, and watch TV every night? Or will he strike out on his own, escaping the dull, monotonous life they have modeled for him? Why can’t he be more like his cousin Thakurjeet, the perfect Indian son, fluent in both Punjabi and English and dedicated to his Sikh religion? Deep has trouble even staying in class at junior college, succumbing to the temptations of Lily. A 27-year-old married Chinese-American woman, Lily is eager to initiate him into the mysteries of smoking, drinking, and sex. And now his older brother, Jag, has slipped into silence. Sidhu (Good Indian Girls, 2013) writes with keen wit and crafts every character with psychological texture, exploring the effects of racism as well as the desire to control a world spinning off its axis: Lily’s hatred of her mother’s prostitution pushes her into an abusive marriage and playing frightening road games targeting other Chinese-Americans. Jag’s designs for a fantastic camera that can capture the blank spaces lurking in the interstices of measured time signal his increasing madness as do his mother’s bright, brave, achingly sad lies about his just needing some rest. Entangled in their messy lives, Deep both resents and loves their weird demands, impositions, and idiosyncrasies. But events careen out of control. Lily turns up with a black eye, Jag stays up all night talking to imaginary people on the phone, and Deep’s love for Lily takes a dark turn. Deep struggles through the final throes of adolescence, scrabbling into the harsh light cast upon sad adult coping strategies of denial, self-hatred, substance abuse, and suicidal behavior.
A heart-wrenching coming-of-age tale in which survival depends more on compassion than rebellion.Pub Date: March 15, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-939419-68-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Unnamed Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 9, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
Absolutely enthralling. Read it.
A young Irish couple gets together, splits up, gets together, splits up—sorry, can't tell you how it ends!
Irish writer Rooney has made a trans-Atlantic splash since publishing her first novel, Conversations With Friends, in 2017. Her second has already won the Costa Novel Award, among other honors, since it was published in Ireland and Britain last year. In outline it's a simple story, but Rooney tells it with bravura intelligence, wit, and delicacy. Connell Waldron and Marianne Sheridan are classmates in the small Irish town of Carricklea, where his mother works for her family as a cleaner. It's 2011, after the financial crisis, which hovers around the edges of the book like a ghost. Connell is popular in school, good at soccer, and nice; Marianne is strange and friendless. They're the smartest kids in their class, and they forge an intimacy when Connell picks his mother up from Marianne's house. Soon they're having sex, but Connell doesn't want anyone to know and Marianne doesn't mind; either she really doesn't care, or it's all she thinks she deserves. Or both. Though one time when she's forced into a social situation with some of their classmates, she briefly fantasizes about what would happen if she revealed their connection: "How much terrifying and bewildering status would accrue to her in this one moment, how destabilising it would be, how destructive." When they both move to Dublin for Trinity College, their positions are swapped: Marianne now seems electric and in-demand while Connell feels adrift in this unfamiliar environment. Rooney's genius lies in her ability to track her characters' subtle shifts in power, both within themselves and in relation to each other, and the ways they do and don't know each other; they both feel most like themselves when they're together, but they still have disastrous failures of communication. "Sorry about last night," Marianne says to Connell in February 2012. Then Rooney elaborates: "She tries to pronounce this in a way that communicates several things: apology, painful embarrassment, some additional pained embarrassment that serves to ironise and dilute the painful kind, a sense that she knows she will be forgiven or is already, a desire not to 'make a big deal.' " Then: "Forget about it, he says." Rooney precisely articulates everything that's going on below the surface; there's humor and insight here as well as the pleasure of getting to know two prickly, complicated people as they try to figure out who they are and who they want to become.
Absolutely enthralling. Read it.Pub Date: April 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-984-82217-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
"This soil," concludes the young narrator of this quiet chronicle of garrotted innocence, "is bad for all kinds of flowers. Certain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruit it will not bear." And among the exclusions of white rural Ohio, echoed by black respectability, is ugly, black, loveless, twelve-year-old Pecola. But in a world where blue-eyed gifts are clucked over and admired, and the Pecolas are simply not seen, there is always the possibility of the dream and wish—for blue eyes. Born of a mother who adjusted her life to the clarity and serenity of white households and "acquired virtues that were easy to maintain" and a father, Cholly, stunted by early rejections and humiliations, Pecola just might have been loved—for in raping his daughter Cholly did at least touch her. But "Love is never better than the lover," and with the death of her baby, the child herself, accepting absolutely the gift of blue eyes from a faith healer (whose perverse interest in little girls does not preclude understanding), inches over into madness. A skillful understated tribute to the fall of a sparrow for whose small tragedy there was no watching eye.
Pub Date: Oct. 29, 1970
ISBN: 0375411550
Page Count: -
Publisher: Holt Rinehart & Winston
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1970
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