A coming-of-age story set in early-20th-century India.
Two sisters’ personal lives get caught up in the changing politics of India in this historical novel.
Chandrapur, India. Sixteen-year-old Leela is training to become a teacher in the early 1900s, but she isn’t overly excited about her career, especially now that her betrothed, Nash, is coming home from Tokyo. He has studied engineering there the past three years, but due to the Russo-Japanese War, the British have ordered all Indian students to leave Japan. Her sister, 15-year-old Maya, is even more restless. “It’s a new world,” she says, dreaming of the end of school. “They have films now, and automobiles. Two years ago we never would have dreamt that we’d get a teacher training college. Two years from now the whole world may be unrecognizable. Why not dream up a place for ourselves within it?” When Nash returns, it is with a revolutionary zeal to unite Hindus and Muslims and throw off British rule—a zeal he attempts to spread to Leela and Maya. The sisters take his advice to try to merge the two girls’ schools—one Hindu, one Muslim. They bring the idea to Zainab, a Muslim colleague. But when Maya gets to know Zainab’s brother, Hassan, a Hindu-Muslim alliance that Leela did not bargain for takes root. Rohatgi’s (Fighting Cane and Canon, 2014) prose is measured and highly detailed, even when balancing the emotional lives of her characters. At one point, Leela narrates: “When Maya chews her cauliflower at dinner that night, her lips are exaggerated, her manner sullen and defiant. I can’t look at my father without feeling tears pool in my eyes, so I stare back at her as she tries to assess whether or not she should tell Papa everything.” The novel does an excellent job of placing readers directly into the politics of the time, highlighting the clash between old and new and between the region’s various subcultures. There are places where the plot drags a bit, but Leela and Maya are so carefully composed that readers will get caught up in this pivotal time in their young lives.
A coming-of-age story set in early-20th-century India.Pub Date: March 8, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-73323-329-3
Page Count: 270
Publisher: Galaxy Galloper Press, LLC
Review Posted Online: Nov. 29, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
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. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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
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