Book Review: Same Sun Here by Silas House and Neela Vaswani

Upon first hearing of this book, I thought I would love it.  Turns out, I wasn't quite that enamored of it, but it's still a solid 3-star book.  It's a mostly sweet penpal correspondence between River, a boy in small town eastern Kentucky, and Meena, an immigrant Indian girl living in NYC. 

I think this book would work equally well for boys or girls and its quiet lessons in multiculturalism would make this a good book for the classroom. There are also some good moments in environmentalism and activism that don't come across as particularly preachy.  I think the two authors did a pretty good job sounding like the characters in their letters, something fairly difficult to sustain in an epistolary book without the prose coming across as too grown-up.

It's more difficult for me to connect with middle grade novels than with YA ones, and this one just didn't have a spark for me, but I can see this book's becoming a required summer read and gain semi-classic status. One of things I had a minor issue with was River's name.  I grew up in the South, and River (and almost as frequently, Rivers) was always a girl's name, River Phoenix notwithstanding, so it was a bit hard adjusting to that. It would be like reading a book where Jeremy was the female protagonist. But I also heard from my colleague Marika that the two authors wrote the book as a series of letters back and forth to each other, which really appeals to me.

Same Sun Here is published by Candlewick this month and I received a free ARC at Winter Institute that I was lucky enough to get signed.  It also qualifies as entries #7-8 in my New Authors challenge, hosted by Literary Escapism (I think that counts as two since I'd read neither of these authors before).It also qualifies for my South Asia challenge hosted every year by S. Krishna.

 

Book Review: Two Short Story Collections by Nathan Englander and Rahul Mehta

It wasn't my express intention to travel with two collections of short stories last weekend when I traveled to Jackson, but that's how the ball bounces sometimes.  The first, Quarantine, by Rahul Mehta is a backlist book from Harper Perennial that I originally purchased for vacation in October but never got the chance to read.  I bought it after reading a review on somebody's blog that I follow, but I cannot for the life of me remember what it was.  The stories in Quarantine are definitely discrete stories (in other words, this is not a novel-in-stories), but they are all explorations in character for young, gay men of Indian extraction.  I found the collection good; always thought-provoking and occasionally disturbing.  Family and cultural expectations weigh heavily on these young men, often resulting in unintentionally cruel or destructive behavior to both their partners and elders.  This appears to be Mehta's first published book, and his short stories are in the popular modern US style (think of the kind of short stories published in The New Yorker these days), which is not my preferred short story style (my two favorites are Jhumpa Lahiri and Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt).  But just because it's not my cup of tea doesn't meant I'm not looking forward to his future work, and I think his is a voice to be reckoned with. (NB: This book qualifies for my South Asian Challenge)

The second collection I read on my trip, What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank by Nathan Englander, gets the award for unwieldiest title of the year, all homage to Raymond Carver aside.   I very much admired Englander's debut collection of stories many years ago called For the Relief of Unbearable Urges and thus was happy when Ann Kingman, my Knopf sales rep, gave me an ARC of this new one to read. Like Mehta's, these stories are about the lives and times of a particular contemporary cultural group--in this case, American and Israeli Jews.  And like Mehta's, these stories are always thought-provoking and occasionally disturbing, and of a New Yorker-y style (I know for a fact that the titular story was published there earlier).

I didn't realize that I would be essentially writing the same review for two story collections that on the surface are quite dissimilar, but when you boil 'em down turn out to be surprisingly identical.  There's a certain narrative remove from each collection, and while Englander has an unconventionally structured first-person story that is presumably somewhat autobiographical, each book has a sameness running throughout it.  I used to think that Englander's voice was one to be reckoned with, too, but now I have to question my judgment.  This collection may be strong in terms of the writing, but it doesn't show much range.  Then again, I have a co-worker who levels that same criticism against Lahiri, whose work I love and emotionally engage in, so maybe you shouldn't pay attention to what I say.

Challenges for 2012...

Despite having a book blog for the better part of three years, I've not really been savvy when it comes to signing up for challenges.  This past year I tried out the South Asian challenge, hosted by S. Krishna, which I want to try again as soon as it opens.  And while spending time reading blogs today, I stumbled across another one I want to try in 2012: New Authors, Exploring New Boundaries, hosted by Literary Escapism for which I have set my goal at 40 new-to-me authors to read in the upcoming year. 

What challenges are you thinking about participating in for 2012? I think I'd like to sign up for one more for the new year.  Do you have any suggestions?  I'm interested in reading literary fiction, narrative non-fiction, YA, and regional fiction of Africa & the Caribbean.

Book Review in Brief: The World We Found by Thrity Umrigar

I think Thrity Umrigar is a tremendous writer.  I discovered her when she published The Weight of Heaven, which was one of the best books I read that year, and I've since gone back and read The Space Between Us, which is frequently touted as her best book.  Her newest book, The World We Found, will be published in January 2012 from Harper, and I liked it very much, indeed. 

Ahh, our college years--those halcyon days characterized by intense friendships, fierce ambitions and a determination to change the world.  Umrigar delves into the heart of those days at university in 1970s Bombay, as remembered by four women whose lives have ended up radically different from their collegiate dreams: one divorced and dying in America whose last wish is to see her three friends, two married and living in upper middle class Mumbai, and one whose difficult marriage has led to her long-time estrangement from their circle.  Painful secrets, both past and present, threaten to prevent their reunion in America and the author beautifully answers the question: what wouldn't you do for your deepest friendships when the call comes?  Blood may be thicker than water, but in this case Umrigar proves that friendship is thicker than blood. Pair all of that with her trademark clear-eyed probing into the socio-religious-political concerns of modern India and you end up with a marvelous novel that is fascinating and disturbing by turns. 

There's that old cliche: Good friends help you move. Great friends help you move bodies.   This is a book about metaphorical body moving (and eerily close to literal at one point) that shows that among this group of four women, there is no statute of limitation on friendship.  

NB: This book qualifies for my South Asian Challenge participation and I read it a few months ago in ARC form, free from my Harper sales rep. 

Book Review in Brief: Miss New India by Bharati Mukherjee

Miss New India by Bharati Mukherjee.  Anjali Bose ("Angie" when she's on the make) typifies the Miss New India: a bright daughter of a traditional, lower middle class family in a small town in northern India, who longs for something beyond the role of dutiful wife & mother that is expected of her.  Her teacher notices her ambition and facility with English and persuades her to move to Bangalore, the call-center capital of the world, but unfortunately not before her parents' matchmaking ends in disaster for Anjali.  Bangalore doesn't seem to be a great improvement, at least at first, but as she finds her way amidst a new crowd of diverse but self-serving young people, she discovers an entire, exciting world whose existence she never even dreamed of.  

This was a novel that I *wanted* to like more than I actually liked it.  While I cannot say that I read a lot of novels about the Indian subcontinent, the ones that I have read I have loved, so that might actually be the cause of my disappointment.  For starters, I could not bring myself to like Anjali/Angie.  Yes, I found her plight sympathetic, and while I could put myself in her shoes to a certain extent and understand her motivations, her choices seemed so misguided and shallow.  At almost every turn I wanted to sit her down and slap some sense into her.  At first I thought that maybe the cultural gap between Angie and me (or between Bangalore and my small suburban town) was too wide and I was disappointed in myself as a reader for my lack of empathy.  But eventually I realized that no, regardless of our disparate backgrounds, Angie seems to remain deliberately obtuse about her situation and the people in her life and that all she really wants is a wealthy man, young or old, to keep her in the style in which she would like to become accustomed.  In fact, she reminds me of nobody so much as the women who people Candace Bushnell's book The Four Blondes--who yearn to be upwardly mobile, who are willing to put up with shabby treatment from men if they are wealthy enough, and who never seem to think about what they might be able to do for someone else while calculating what the someone else should do for them.  

Still, there many other things to recommend this book, including the city of Bangalore, a far more fascinating character to me than Angie ever was.  Bangalore seems far more fully fleshed than the people of this novel, and Mukherjee's sense of place is very finely drawn.  

NB: This is my first entry this year in the South Asian Challenge 2011.   I received the book in ARC format from my Houghton Mifflin Harcourt sales rep, Holly Ruck, a couple of months ago.  The book just released in hardcover this week.  

Book Challenges for 2011

Being relatively new to the bookblogging world, I've never signed up for any of the yearly challenges, but 2011 will change all of that for me.  The first challenge I'm signing up for is the South Asian Challange 2011, hosted by S. Krishna's Books, which I found through this weekend's blog hop.  I'm looking forward to rounding out my reading of some favorite authors like Thrity Umrigar and Amitav Ghosh as well as discovering some new ones.  And since the challenge this year encompasses travel literarure and cookbooks, too, it will be an experience all the more rich.

Thrity Umrigar came to our store in 2009 for her book, The Weight of Heaven, which I just loved--so much that I begged, cajoled, and bribed other readers on the committee to make her our First Editions Club selection that month.  Okay, so it didn't take a lot of begging, cajoling and bribing, as the book is amazing and tragic and beautiful, all wrapped up into one compelling read, and as soon as my fellow committee members read it, they all agreed that it was perfect for our FEC.  Thrity was as lovely as can be, giving a great reading followed by a provocative Q&A session,  promising that she would return to our store for her next book.  Thrity, we're going to hold you to that promise!


 I can pretty much guarantee that it will be one of her books that will launch my participation in this challenge--it's always nice to know that the authors you love to read are also monumentally terrific people!