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
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
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