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Saraswati’s Way by Monika Schroder

Dec21

Twelve year old Akash sees patterns of numbers in his head. The village math teacher can only take him so far in math, bu he puts an idea in Akash’s mind of winning a scholarship to a school in the city. So Akash prays to Saraswati, the goddess of knowledge and wisdom, to make a way for him to hire a tutor to teach the math he needs to know to pass the scholarship examination.

The last book I read, Words in the Dust, was set in Afghanistan and was very Muslim, and now this book, set in India, is very Hindu. Akash prays to Saraswati, goes to the temple, performs Hindu funeral rites for his father (Bapu) in hopes that his Bapu’s soul will be freed to go . . . somewhere good. If this honest and vivid depiction of Hindu religion makes you uncomfortable, as I must admit it did me to some extent, then maybe that’s a good thing. I tend to forget that there are people who live and die in the grips of what I would consider an enslaving and false religious tradition.

Akash becomes a child of the streets, living in the railway station in Delhi. He works and works to find a way to attend a school where he can learn more, especially more math. He makes some good decisions (saving his money and not sniffing glue) and some nearly disastrous ones (dealing drugs to make money). And in the end, the reader is left with only the hope that Akash might, just possibly, be able to go to school and get off the streets.

Author Monika Schroder says in her Author’s Note:

A boy like Akash has only a slim chance of fulfilling his dream in contemporary India. Yet I wanted to write a hopeful book about a child who, with determination, courage, and some luck, achieves his goal against all odds.

If you like this book about a street child in India and you’re interested in similar or related stories, I recommend:

Boys Without Names by Kashmira Sheth. Brief Semicolon review here.
Monsoon Summer by Mitali Perkins. Semicolon review here.
Homeless Bird by Gloria Whelan.
What Then, Raman? by Shirley Arora.
The movie, Slumdog Millionaire.

BBAW Interview Swap

Sep14

Swapna Krishna of S. Krishna’s Books is a 20-something reader and book blogger from Washington, D.C. Since she’s about the age of my Eldest Daughter, it was a blast to swap interviews with her for Book Blogger Appreciation Week and get some reading recommendations from the younger generation.

We don’t know each other at all, but I am indebted to you for several good reading suggestions including Best Intentions by Emily Listfield and Eat, Drink and Be from Mississippi by Nanci Kincaid. I see that you also enjoyed The Help by Kathryn Stockett. That brief list makes me think we share a fondness for literature set in the South. Is that so, and if so, can you name other favorite pieces of Southern literature?

Yes!! I do very much enjoy literature set in the South. One of my favorite authors, not just of Southern fiction but generally, is Karen White. She specializes in Southern fiction – I love The House on Tradd Street, The Memory of Water, and The Lost Hours, just to name a few. I also loved Beth Hoffman’s Saving CeeCee Honeycutt, a book I know made its way around the blogosphere.

How did you get started as a reader? As a book blogger?

I’ve been a reader all my life – I started reading at the tender age of 3, thanks to my older sister who taught me to read! I started as a book blogger over 2 years ago. I had gotten to a point where I would buy books, bring them home, and realize I’d already read them but didn’t remember the titles because I didn’t keep track of what I was reading. I tried a paper journal, but I filled it up so quickly that it seemed silly. I’d already been reading book blogs by then, so I thought I’d start one to review books, but also just to keep a record of what I’d read!

If you could vacation in a book world, where would you go to get away from it all? What book would you like to enter into and interact with the characters?

Oooh, lovely question! This is cliche, but probably Harry Potter. I loved how vivid of a world J.K. Rowling created. Those books are still my escape when I need to get away from life for awhile. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve read them.

I read at your website that you are a member of the National Book Critics Circle. What is that, and why did you join?

The NBCC is a association of book reviewers, mostly print reviewers. I joined when I started working with The Book Studio, a book website that features video interviews with authors. I haven’t really done much with it, but it’s nice to have!

I also noticed your South Asian Review Database and your South Asian Author Challenge, a different kind of “Southern literature.”What are those all about?

That’s so true, I didn’t think of it that way, but it is a different type of Southern literature, ha! South Asia consists of countries around the Indian subcontinent – India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Nepal, etc. My heritage is South Asian, so I’ve always been very interested in literature from the region. In mid-2009, I realized there wasn’t a huge presence of South Asian literature within the blogosphere, and the South Asian Challenge was an effort to rectify that. The South Asian Review Database is a place where anyone (challenge participant or not) can come to link up their reviews of books by South Asian authors. It’s all my effort to promote the literature of the region, I only wish I could do more!

What are your favorite books and/or authors from South Asia?

Well, I’ll have to include the cliche answers, Salman Rushdie and Jhumpa Lahiri. Rushdie got me interested in South Asian literature when I read The Satanic Verses in high school (though, knowing what I know now, there’s no way I could have fully understood it and I must go back and read it sometime). Recently, I’ve become a cheerleader for Thrity Umrigar. All of her books are good, but The Weight of Heaven just blew me away. Additionally, Shilpi Somaya Gowda’s The Secret Daughter was just amazing. I also love Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni (she is an incredibly prolific author, but I’ve only read 2 of her books) and Indu Sundaresan’s historical fiction.

What book or books inspire you?

Hmmm, this is a tough one. Books with beautiful writing usually inspire me, hence why I am such a fan of Salman Rushdie. Fyodor Dostoevsky, W. Somerset Maugham – these are writers I love simply because their prose speaks to me. It really stirs something within me.

What do you like to do when you’re not reading?

When I’m not reading, I’m usually spending time with my husband. He works a lot, so when he’s not working, we’re usually together. We love watching TV, and to a lesser extent, movies. I’ve gotten him into Indian movies (he isn’t Indian), so we’ve been watching more of those lately! We love to eat good food and we travel A LOT (a little too much lately, if you ask me!) I love spending time with my friends, though many aren’t local, so I do spend too much time on the phone, and it’s why I travel so much. I also just love to experience the area I live in, Washington DC.

You’re sort of a veteran book blogger. What advice do you have for those who are new to book blogging?

Funny, I don’t think of myself as a veteran! I guess my advice to those who are new to book blogging would be to READ. I know it sounds silly, but seriously. Read anything and everything. Consistent posts are crucial if you’re trying to build an audience. Additionally, I know it’s tempting to start clamoring for review copies the second you start a blog, but resist that temptation and wait for awhile! Review your own books or library books – build up a healthy review library before you start asking publishers for books.

Thanks, Swapna. I really did enjoy getting to know you and your blog, and I’m planning to read some more South Asian fiction soon. You’ve inspired me!

And here Swapna interviews me. You know, you could just be-bop back and forth all day: Swapna to Semicolon, Semicolon to Swapna, S. Krishna’s Books to Semicolon’s reviews, etc. Have a great day.

Black Narcissus by Rumer Godden

May12

A coterie of Anglican nuns comes to a remote Himalayan village to establish a convent, school, and hospital for the improvement and benefit of the natives. Instead of making any impression at all on the villagers, the nuns themselves are changed and brought to confront their deepest fears, desires, and inadequacies.

Simple enough to summarize, the novel can be read as simple and somewhat simplistic. When confronted by the great and inscrutable Mysteries of the East, Western Christian minds can only choose to give in and “go native” or be broken by the weight of all that cumulative Eastern wisdom. This truism would probably satisfy many readers of Godden’s novel.

However, it doesn’t satisfy me. I don’t really believe that a “bend or be broken” moral was all that Ms. Godden meant to convey in this novel either. The following conversation between Sister Adela and a Hindu prince that she is tutoring is key:

“Pantheism?” he cried, writing it down delightedly. “And that? How do you spell it and what is it?”
“Saying that God is in everything, animate and inanimate, in the trees and stones and streams.”
“That sounds very beautiful,” he said thoughtfully, “but it certainly isn’t true.”
Sister Adela was surprised. “Why are you so sure?” she asked.
“Because,” he said, “we can conquer trees and streams and stones; we can cut down the forest and dam the stream and break up the stones, but we can’t conquer God.”
“Now he,” he said pointing with his pen, “might very well be in the mountain. We call it Kanchenjungha, and we believe that God is there. No one can conquer that mountain, and they never will. Men can’t conquer God; they only go mad for the love of Him.”

Ms. Godden isn’t advocating mountain worship any more than the psalmist was: “I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills from whence cometh my help.” Rather, the mountain is a symbol, a picture, of the invincibility and yes, the inscrutability of God Himself. When we come face to face with the Eternal we can either give up or go mad. When we recognize our own insignificance and inability to be anything, we can repent and be still or run screaming off the cliff. Job or Job’s wife?

There’s a movie version of Black Naricissus with Deborah Kerr as Mother Superior Clodagh. I’ll probably check it out even though I fear it may be a disappointment. Hollywood isn’t known for making deeply meaningful and subtle spiritual films.

Secret Keeper by Mitali Perkins

Jan13

I had been saving the ARC I received of Mitali Perkins’ new YA novel Secret Keeper for a treat and because I thought that a review closer to the time of publication would be more helpful to readers. In December I succumbed, and read it.

Such a powerful story! It’s something of a romance, and I so wanted everything to turn out just like the fairy tales. And yet I felt as I read that it couldn’t really have a traditional happy ending and that it couldn’t have been written in any other way. Secret Keeper is a tale of love and loss, of traditional family and of new ways and mores creeping into and disrupting the old conventions. It’s a story that bridges cultures and creates understanding and makes even WASPs like me feel a twinge of identification with the characters and their very human situations.

The main character of the novel is sixteen year old Asha, the younger of two daughters in the Gupta family. As the story opens, Asha, her sister Reet, and their mother are on a train headed for a visit of indeterminate length with their Baba’s family in Calcutta. Baba (Father) himself is in America looking for work, having lost his job as a result of the economic difficulties in India in the early 1970’s, the time period for the book. Asha is not sure how the small family will manage to fit into her uncle’s household in Calcutta even for the short amount of time she expects them to stay before Baba send for them to join him in the U.S. Asha’s grandmother lives with Asha’s uncle’s very traditional family, and the three women will be three more mouths to feed, unable to make much, if any, contribution to the welfare of the family. As events unfold, Asha depends on her diary, nicknamed Secret Keeper, to hold her thoughts and dreams and to keep her sane in a tension-filled household.

Girls, especially those who are trying to balance responsibilities to family and to themselves, will find Asha to be a sympathetic character and a role model. When she is faced with a crisis, she makes the best decision she can both for herself and for her small family, and even though her solution to the family’s problems is imperfect and open to criticism, it is the difficulty of her decision that makes the family strong again and renews their bonds, bonds that have been stretched to the breaking point.

I really think that this book is Ms. Perkins’ best book to date, an exploration of cultural norms and changing roles, of responsibility to self and to family, and of flawed but loving answers to difficult issues. I highly recommend Secret Keeper, available in bookstores and from Amazon starting today. (Click on the book cover to order from Amazon.)

Other reviewers:

Book Embargo: “It was a beautiful book.. (haven’t I said that already?) But it really was. The family dynamics, with the father gone to America, the mother and two sisters left to live with relatives. The money problems, the Indian culture, it was all so beautifully written and described.”

To This Great Stage of Fools: Born January 11th

Jan11

Alan Paton, b.1903, d.1988. Mr. Paton is the South African author of at least three novels: Cry, the Beloved Country, Too Late the Phalarope, and Ah, But Your Land Is Beautiful. All three are well worth your reading time. Previous Alan Paton birthday posts:
Alan Paton and Cry, the Beloved Country.
Alan Paton’s other two novels.

If you like Cry, the Beloved Country, you should definitely read Paton’s other two novels. Then, you might also like these books, somewhat similar in style and/or subject matter.

Nectar in a Sieve by Kamala Markandaya is the story of Rukmani, the fourth daughter in a poor family in India. Her life, as she and her family become poorer and poorer, is still a life of dignity even in the most impoverished circumstances.

Peace Like a River by Leif Enger is also, like Cry, the Beloved Country, about love and forgiveness and about a prodigal son and the lengths to which a father will go to reclaim that son.

River Rising by Athol Dickson is similar to Cry, the Beloved Country in that it deals in a redemptive way with race and race relations, but the setting is Louisiana in the 1920’s.

Try any or all of these, but first, if you’ve never read Cry, the Beloved Country, do so. I highly recommend it.

Monsoon Summer by Mitali Perkins

Nov16

Monsoon Summer is light reading for the teenage set, but it’s good, decent, well-constructed, light reading, with even a few details and episodes thrown in to provoke a bit of thought.

Jazz Gardner is fifteen, the daughter of an ethnic Indian mother, who was adopted from an orphanage in India as a young child. Jazz’s father is a computer programmer, the strong , silent type, who supports her mother in all her philanthropic projects. Jazz is expected to participate in “helping others”, but she doesn’t really think she has the right personality to help anyone since the only time she ever attempted to do a good deed, it turned into a disaster. Since then, she’s stayed out of philanthropy and used her time to run a successful tourist business with her best friend, Steve.

Now Jazz’s mom tells her that the family is going to spend the summer in India, helping out at the orphanage that Mrs. Gardner lived in before she was adopted. And at about the same time, Jazz realizes that her feelings for Steve, her longtime business partner, have turned into something more than just platonic friendship. Unfortunately, there’s no indication from Steve that he sees Jazz as anything but a friend and a partner. And other girls are after Steve. And the business needs her. And who wants to go to India, anyway?

Jazz learns a lot about herself and her own abilities as she copes with a foreign culture, and she learns something about how to relate to Steve, even from the other side of the world. The picture of India and Indian culture is vividly drawn, and Jazz’s Indian friend, Danita, has something to teach Jazz, just as Jazz finds out that she has gifts that can help her friend. I think I’ll recommend this one to Brown Bear Daughter, even though she’s only eleven (going on twenty). The relationship between Jazz and her friend, Steve, is treated sensitively and yet honestly.

The orphanage in the story is a Christian orphanage, so the characters are mostly at least nominal Christians. The religious differences between India and the U.S. are hardly mentioned. However, the cultural differences loom large. Jazz is amazed at the possibility that her friend, Danita, may marry a much older man in order to provide a home for herself and her orphaned sisters. Jazz is also surprised at the caste prejudice that she encounters as Indians who look different are treated better or worse according to their perceived caste. Then, too, Jazz is trying, as do many adolescent girls, to figure out her own attitude about her body, about whether she is attractive or not, what it is that makes a girl pretty, what others think about her looks and why. These more thoughtful parts of the novel come across as real without being preachy or over-emphasized.

If you’re looking for a good, solid story for your teenage girl that will hold her interest without being a problem-of-the-week novel or a trashy romance, Monsoon Summer fits the bill.

World Geography Week 12: India

Nov6


Music:
Felix Mendelssohn—Midsummer Night’s Dream Overture

Mission Study:
1. Window on the World: India
2. WotW: Sri Lanka
3. Bold Bearers of His Name: Pandita Rambai
4. WotW: Bhutan
5. WotW: Gonds

Poems:
My Poetry Book: When It’s Time to Play

Science:
Electricity

Nonfiction Read Alouds:
Friends of India–Hill This one is a missions books that we have on hand.

Fiction Read Alouds:
A Little Princess–Burnett I love this classic story of Sara Crewe and her attic room and her courage and perseverance.
Daughter of the Mountains–Rankin

Picture Books:
Take a Trip to India—Lye
If You Were Born In India
Take a Trip to Nepal—Lye
Mama’s Saris–Makhijani Available in 2007. I read about this picture book here at Fuse 8, and I wish we had a copy to go along with our India study. Bee Girl would enjoy it as much as she enjoys her shawl from France that she drapes about her in various artistic and fashionable ways.

Elementary Readers:
Remarkable Story of Prince Jen—Alexander
Anni’s India Diary—Axworthy
What Then, Raman?–Arora
The Road to Agra–Sommerfelt
To the Top! Climbing the World’s Highest Mountain—Kramer

Movies:
Choose Your Own Adventure: The Abominable Snowman
Lagaan

As always, I’ll be happy to take suggestions.

Gay-Neck: The Story of a Pigeon by Dhan Gopal Mukerji

Aug16

If you’re interested in carrier pigeons, or pet birds, or India, or birds used in war, this Newbery award book from 1928 might just fit the bill. Yes, it’s somewhat dated in style and content. Yes, the first half of the book is a nature story reminiscent of Jean Craighead George’s books such as The Other Side of the Mountain, and the second half changes focus and deals with themes of fear, war, and religion. Yes, the narration jumps back and forth from the boy who owns and trains the pigeon to Gay-Neck himself telling his own story by means of “the grammar of fancy and the dictionary of imagination.” Yes, its audience would probably be limited, but I think there are some children and adults, especially nature lovers and bird lovers, who would really like this book.

Dhan Gopal Mukerji was born near Calcutta in 1890 and came to the United States at the age of nineteen. So, I’m fairly sure he gets the atmosphere of life for a boy in early twentieth century India. Mukerji wrote other nature stories, including Kari the Elephant and Hari the Jungle Lad. In Gay-Neck, Mukerji gives a lot of information about pigeons and about training pigeons, and he imparts that information by means of a fascinating story of the adventures of one particular pigeon, Gay-Neck or Chitra-griva.

The descriptions of the pigeons’ defense against their enemies, eagles and hawks, and of their capacity to deliver messages even in the midst of battle are detailed enough to make the reader feel as if he could go out, purchase a pigeon, and begin training tomorrow. And it sounds like fun. As an adult and a non-animal lover, I’m sure it’s not that simple, but don’t be surprised if a child, after reading this book, wants his own bird to train and watch and admire.

Gay-neck is admirable. Even when he gives in to fear after a deadly encounter with a predatory hawk, and again after his war experiences, Gay-Neck is able to make a comeback. “Love for his mate and the change of place and climate healed him of fear, that most fell disease.”

The story does take place in India, and it’s filled with lamas and monks and Hindu or Buddhist prayer and meditation. If that’s going to bother you or confuse your child, but you still want a book about training pigeons or about India, try something else. However, if you can appreciate the story as a picture of another place and another time, a vivid portrait of a boy and his pet bird, and a good imaginary tale of India and its culture and a childhood in the Indian countryside, you should enjoy this book

Gay-Neck is a good homeschool book. It would make a fun read aloud for children who haven’t been spoiled by too much action in TV and movies. Gay-Neck has lots of action, war and predators and natural disasters, but the reader or listener must have an imagination to appreciate the story. Gay-Neck would be good to read during a science study of birds or ecosystems, or as we’re doing, during a study of India and its culture. The boy in the story spends most of his time with his pigeons, caring for them and training them, and he learns a great deal about birds and about communication and about fear and courage. I can see a homeschooled child making the raising of pigeons a cross-curricular project and learning more than just how to train birds, too.

Finally, I leave you with a sample of Mukerji’s observations on nature, especially animal life:

I thought, “The buffalo that in nature looks healthy and silken, in a zoo is a mangy creature with matted mane and dirty skin. Can those who see buffalo in captivity ever conceive how beautiful they can be? What a pity that most young people instead of seeing one animal in nature–which is worth a hundred in any zoo–must derive their knowledge of God’s creatures from their appearance in prisons! If we cannot perceive any right proportion of man’s moral nature by looking at prisoners in a jail, how do we manage to think that we know all about an animal by gazing at him penned in a cage?”

Nectar in a Sieve by Kamala Markandaya

Feb28

Work without hope draws nectar in a sieve,
And hope without an object cannot live. –Coleridge

I read this book last week and thought it gave a beautiful, but very sad, picture of life in India for many people. It’s the story of a poor family, a fourth daughter who, because she has no dowry, cannot marry well but must settle for marriage to a landless tenant farmer who brings her home to a mud hut he built himself. Fortunately for the girl, Rukmani, her husband Nathan is “poor in everything but in love and care for me, his wife, whom he took at the age of twelve.”
Rukmani narrates the story in first person, telling of the birth of her daughter, the long wait during which the couple think they will have no more children, and then the birth of her five sons. The village where the family lives is on the edge of poverty and starvation; a bad year with too much rain or too little rain will push Rukmani’s family over the edge. Change and new economic oportunities come to the village; however, these new ideas and possibilities are full of danger too, for peasants who have nothing in reserve and are unable or unwilling to move with the times.
I wrote about a month ago about some of my favorite fantasy worlds. These fantasy worlds were first encountered on the pages of books. Then, there are historical and sociological worlds that I visit mostly in books, too. Finally, there is the actual world. I’ve never been to India or China or South America, but I have a picture of what life in those lands is (or was) like–again, from books. I think that Nectar in a Sieve, first published in 1954, will become a large part of my picture of India, along with missionary stories, the young man I met a few years ago at Baptist World Alliance Youth Conference, and other sources, such as the women I see at the grocery store here in Clear Lake dressed in saris.
Warning: The book has a bittersweet ending, but it’s realistic without being hopeless and depressing. Excellent.
These are some of my favorite books that have given me a picture of the world. Most of them are fiction.
Around the world in books:
South Africa: Cry, the Beloved Country and Too Late the Phalarope both by Alan Paton
India: Homeless Bird by Gloria Whelan
China: Imperial Woman by Pearl S.Buck, The Importance of Living by Lin Yutang
Antarctica: Troubling a Star by Madeleine L’Engle
The Netherlands: The Hiding Place by Corrie Ten Boom
England (Yorkshire): All Creatures Great and Small by James Herriot
Lebanon: Alice by ? Doerr
Russia: The Endless Steppe by Esther Hautzig (And, of course, Tolstoy and Dostoyevski, although they’re more historical)
Israel: Exodus by Leon Uris
Hawaii: Hawaii by James Michener

For some of these places, all my ideas about the culture come from the book I listed. For others, I am certainly indebted to the book for most of my information. Can you suggest any books that capture the culture and living conditions of a country in either fiction or biography? I do prefer and learn more from stories.