Another new season is here:
Spring! It's time for the Spring Challenge! This season, I think it will be fun to read books about other cultures: books that take place in different countries, books that discuss the immigrant experience, memoirs by foreign authors, etc. I've chosen these 3 books:
A Disobedient Girl by Ru Freeman
Set against the volatile events of the last forty years of Sri Lankan history,
A Disobedient Girl traces the lives of three characters whose interwoven fates and histories force them to answer life's most difficult questions. Beautiful, haunting, alive, and brimming with truth, it is, above all, a novel about extraordinary circumstances that change life in an instant and the power of love to transcend time and place.
The story begins with two little girls, mistress and servant, one with every luxury and opportunity that money can buy and the other with nothing but her yearning for a better life. Together, they grow up bound by love, betrayal, resentment, and an impossible secret.
Then there is Biso, a devoted mother of three, who risks everything to escape from the hands of her tyrannical husband. But her journey, which begins with such hope, takes her on a disastrous path that ultimately leads her to give her life over to strangers she never imagined she would have reason to know, binding her story with that of the girls in the most unexpected and heartbreaking of ways.
A Disobedient Girl is a compelling exploration of personal desire set against the volatile backdrop of class and prejudice, as three women journey toward their future, united by a shared history but separated by different fates. A bold and deeply moving account that spans three decades of love and loss, it is a tale about the will to survive and the incredible power of the human spirit to transcend the unforgiving sweep of tragedy.
A Good Indian Wife by Anne Cherian
Neel Sarath, an Indian-American anesthesiologist in San Francisco, believes he's distanced himself from traditional Indian life with his blonde American girlfriend, his Porsche, and his spotless, Pine-Sol-scented condo. But after his family tricks him into coming home for an arranged marriage, the newlyweds surprise each other. Neel discovers that Leila Krishnan, the woman who becomes his wife, is not a meek, traditional girl who can be set aside while life goes on as usual, girlfriend and all. Leila is a literature teacher from the small town in South India where Neel grew up, and she knows more about the world through her books than Neel has ever learned in his single-minded study of medicine. Leila, too, finds that being married to the distinguished Dr. Sarath is more difficult than she anticipated, maybe more than adjusting to a life outside India. Neel and Leila struggle to reconcile their own desires with the expectations of others in a story of two people, two countries, and two ways of life that may be more compatible than they seem. In
A Good Indian Wife, Anne Cherian explores what happens when complicated people get married first, and have to woo each other later.
The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai
Desai takes us to the northeastern Himalayas where a rising insurgency challenges the old way of life. In a crumbling, isolated house at the foot of Mount Kanchenjunga lives an embittered old judge who wants to retire in peace when his orphaned granddaughter Sai arrives on his doorstep. The judge's chatty cook watches over her, but his thoughts are mostly with his son, Biju, hopscotching from one New York restaurant job to another, trying to stay a step ahead of the INS, forced to consider his country's place in the world. When a Nepalese insurgency in the mountains threatens Sai's new-sprung romance with her handsome Nepali tutor and causes their lives to descend into chaos, they, too, are forced to confront their colliding interests. The nation fights itself. The cook witnesses the hierarchy being overturned and discarded. The judge must revisit his past, his own role in this grasping world of conflicting desires-every moment holding out the possibility for hope or betrayal.
Will you be joining in the Spring Challenge? Read my books or choose your own. Let me know what books you pick if you decide on others.
