A tight, suspenseful narrative that interweaves one girl’s keen observations of family within India’s problematic history.
An elegantly rendered debut memoir of a Muslim family living through widespread religious violence.
As Chowdhary recounts, her extended middle-class family was essentially trapped in their apartment in the Muslim “ghetto” of Ahmadabad for many weeks following the horrendous train burning that killed Hindu passengers at Godhra on Feb. 27, 2002. The then-little-known chief minister of Gujarat, Narendra Modi, inflamed the violence by calling it an “Islamic terrorist attack,” and, as the author writes, “the next day raging Hindu mobs, formed by thousands of people, poured into Gujarat’s streets, in cities, villages, and towns, looting, raping, and burning alive the state’s Muslim citizens. The massacre continued for three months.” At the time, Chowdhary was 16, hoping soon to take her end-of-year exams. Instead, she was forced to navigate unimaginable terror outside her home, as well as the familial tension building inside their apartment, involving her mother, Amma, a soldier’s daughter from Madras; Papa, a hard-drinking retired government clerk; and his critical mother, Dadi. The author describes how she was understandably protective of her mother, the dark-skinned outsider whom Papa and Dadi often blamed for their misfortunes. Chowdhary establishes the sense of foreboding immediately: “Our home believed in many things but not its daughters.” The author sensed that the delicate balance among the neighbors of different religions living “cheek by jowl” in the city had been irreparably ruptured by the violence, in which Modi was blamed for being complicit. “It doesn’t matter this evening that this land we all stand on is the land of Gandhi,” she writes near the beginning of this memorable book. “Something has been eviscerated. Something has changed. A new land and a new people reborn in fire.”
A tight, suspenseful narrative that interweaves one girl’s keen observations of family within India’s problematic history.Pub Date: July 16, 2024
ISBN: 9780593727430
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 31, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: today
A compelling, often chilling look inside today’s version of the Gulag.
The WNBA star recounts her imprisonment by the Putin regime.
“My horror begins in a land I thought I knew, on a trip I wish I hadn’t taken,” writes Griner. She had traveled to Russia before, playing basketball for the Yekaterinburg franchise of the Russian league during the WNBA’s off-season, but on this winter day in 2022, she was pulled aside at the Moscow airport and subjected to an unexpected search that turned up medically prescribed cannabis oil. As the author notes, at home in Arizona, cannabis is legal, but not in Russia. After initial interrogation—“They seemed determined to get me to admit I was a smuggler, some undercover drug lord supplying half the country”—she was bundled off to await a show trial that was months in coming. With great self-awareness, the author chronicles the differences between being Black and gay in America and in Russia. “When you’re in a system with no true justice,” she writes, “you’re also in a system with a bunch of gray areas.” Unfortunately, despite a skilled Russian lawyer on her side, Griner had trouble getting to those gray areas, precisely because, with rising tensions between the U.S. and Russia following the invasion of Ukraine, Putin’s people seemed intent on making an example of her. Between spells in labor camps, jails, and psych wards, the author became a careful observer of the Russian penal system and its horrors. Navigating that system proved exhausting; since her release following an exchange for an imprisoned Russian arms dealer (about which the author offers a le Carré–worthy account of the encounter in Abu Dhabi), she has been suffering from PTSD. That struggle has invigorated her, though, in her determination to free other unjustly imprisoned Americans, a plea for which closes the book.
A compelling, often chilling look inside today’s version of the Gulag.Pub Date: May 7, 2024
ISBN: 9780593801345
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 7, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
An unflinching self-portrait.
The tumultuous life of a bisexual, autistic comic.
In her debut memoir, Scottish comedian Brady recounts the emotional turmoil of living with undiagnosed autism. “The public perception of autistics is so heavily based on the stereotype of men who love trains or science,” she writes, “that many women miss out on diagnosis and are thought of as studious instead.” She was nothing if not studious, obsessively focused on foreign languages, but she found it difficult to converse in her own language. From novels, she tried to gain “knowledge about people, about how they spoke to each other, learning turns of phrase and metaphor” that others found so familiar. Often frustrated and overwhelmed by sensory overload, she erupted in violent meltdowns. Her parents, dealing with behavior they didn’t understand—including self-cutting—sent her to “a high-security mental hospital” as a day patient. Even there, a diagnosis eluded her; she was not accurately diagnosed until she was 34. Although intimate friendships were difficult, she depicts her uninhibited sexuality and sometimes raucous affairs with both men and women. “I grew up confident about my queerness,” she writes, partly because of “autism’s lack of regard for social norms.” While at the University of Edinburgh, she supported herself as a stripper. “I liked that in a strip club men’s contempt of you was out in the open,” she admits. “In the outside world, misogyny was always hovering in your peripheral vision.” When she worked as a reporter for the university newspaper, she was assigned to try a stint as a stand-up comic and write about it; she found it was work she loved. After “about a thousand gigs in grim little pubs across England,” she landed an agent and embarked on a successful career. Although Brady hopes her memoir will “make things feel better for the next autistic or misfit girl,” her anger is as evident as her compassion.
An unflinching self-portrait.Pub Date: June 6, 2023
ISBN: 9780593582503
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Harmony
Review Posted Online: March 10, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2023
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
