Cultural appropriation?
Should authors write about communities that they themselves do not belong to? I can see both sides. On the one hand, a writer should be free to write about anything they want, and we, the readers, get to decide if...
Fiction
Understated poignancy
If your tastes in books runs to family relationships and domestic drama, to the understated and the quietly poignant, this is an example of an excellent read. It is not an explosive kind of novel, everything happens very quietly, beneath...
Gods on Earth
It is a cliché that everything is bigger in Texas. In fact, so big as to be Olympian. So goes the conceit of this novel. Set in a fictional town called Olympus, halfway between Houston and Austin, in a sprawling...
Murder at an elderly pace
This is a book which sets out to amuse and entertain. And to some extent, it does this well enough, offering a frothy, light read that carefully avoids straying into the frivolous or the trite. It is a whodunnit, but...
Multi-threaded Roman fabric
Difficult to slot into any genre, The Vietri Project starts with a notion that will appeal to book-lovers. Every few weeks, a letter arrives at a bookstore in Berkeley, California, asking for a large collection of books to be shipped...
Shaped and marked by the war in Sri Lanka
As befits a philosophy graduate from Columbia, the novel opens with a contemplation of the notion of time and its elusive nature, before introducing us to Krishan and his home life in Colombo with his mother and aging grandmother. ...
Juvenile writing
“Noriko, promise me that you will obey in all things. Do not question. Do not fight. Do not resist. Do not think if thinking will lead you somewhere you ought not to be. Only smile and do as you are...
Faith, science and addiction in an immigrant family
Having reading reviews of how harrowing Gyasi’s Homegoing was, I have still not summoned the courage to read it yet, but her second novel has turned out very readable. Our protagonist is Gifty, a second generation Ghanaian immigrant in the...
Fish and chips and a slice of life
Here is a list of things Majella, the twenty-something year old Big Girl at the center of this novel, likes: Eating Dallas (except for the 1985-6 season, also known as Bobby’s Dream) UK Gold [this TV channel?] Her da Her...
A less mythical frontier story
In the 1900s, authors like Zane Grey and Louis L’Amour rode the peak of the ‘Western’ genre with their enormous output. These books typically featured tough, sharp-shooting, quick-on-the-draw white men with beautiful horses who rode the wild country of the...
Distinct and well-developed characters
When the story first begins, our protagonist, Libby (14), is in a car, sitting in the back with Thomas (18) her older brother, and Ellen (12) her younger sister in the middle. Her mum, Faye, is driving, and eldest sister...
You gotta be twice as good
There’s a recent spate of American novels which expose the toxic reality of apparently exciting jobs. The Nanny Diaries featured a young white woman working as a nanny for wealthy New Yorkers, and revealed that the employers were jealous, self-centered,...
An easy Metro read
It must be admitted that I picked up this book displayed in the New Books section in the library because the blurb at the back said, “A beautiful tale for everyone who likes to end a book with a smile...
The seedy underbelly of the model minority
It is no secret that the Indian-American middle class community is ambitious and competitive. Immigrants with professional backgrounds and advanced degrees who arrive in a new country typically push their children to even higher achievements. Many novels have described the...
The End of the Road?
Once again like her penultimate novel, The Motion of the Body Through Space, Shriver presents us with a couple (though British this time, not American) who are in the mid-later stages of life, as our protagonists. And once again, they...
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