~ The Bride Wore Red, by Robbie Clipper Sethi ~
The author is an American woman who married a Sikh man, and the book is a collection of short stories about American women who married Sikh men. Most first-time authors do write from their own lives, but in this instance, I was not impressed.
The first story, about the American/Sikh couple who went to India and were swept into a formal wedding by than’s family, set the tone: ‘swarthy faces’, ‘saris flash color’, ‘turbans bulge’ and so on. Granted this may be what a new visitor to India would see, and it can be fascinating to see your country through another pair of eyes, but these stories didn’t come up with much more than cliches. Some stories were written from the p.o.v of the Indian parents, but I sensed little affection for those characters. The Sikh men who braved the cultural expectations of their families to marry their foreign wives, are, in these stories, largely passive thereafter. I did not find any unique insights or perceptive comments.
One of the better stories was ‘Grace’, about an American woman who couldn’t handle the constant intrusions into her privacy by her Indian in-laws. One of the worst was “Missing Persons”, with a literature-class writing technique where the characters switch sex every couple of pages. This was merely irritating.
The Bride Wore Red, by: Tales of a Cross-Cultural Family. By Robbie Clipper Sethi. Bridgeworks, 1996
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