Nose in a Book

Secret Daughter by Shilpi Somaya Gowda

Read for: Book club, Canadian Book Challenge

Kavita, a young Indian woman has given birth to two daughters.  After her husband took the first one and killed it, she was determined to save the second.  She manages to get to an orphanage in Mumbai where she leaves the baby before returning to her village.  Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, Somer is coming to terms with her inability to conceive a child.  Somer’s husband (who is Indian himself) suggests they adopt a baby from India.  They travel to India and (surprise, surprise) adopt the girl Kavita left at the orphanage.

The story is told in short little chapters from the point of view of several of the characters.  This bothered me.  If the story had been told from the perspective of just the three women, I think it may have worked better.  Also, the chapters were so short, I didn’t have a lot of time to get involved in the story or get to know the characters very well.  It really broke up the flow of the novel.

Also, I kind of hated the characters.  Granted, they had some seriously emotionally troubling issues to deal with but I just found them to be kind of whiny and annoying.  Through most of the book I just wanted to smack Somer and tell her to “slap out of it.”  (Cougar Town, anyone?)  And Kavita, well she was just the stereotypical downtrodden woman.  And I’m not saying this isn’t realistic (how would I know, I grew up in Canada) but she just wasn’t likable, I felt no sympathy for her plight.  (Unlike women like Mariam in A Thousand Splendid Suns or Aminata in The Book of Negroes.)

I also found the book to be a little bit on the cheesy side.  I think it actually had a lot of potential but something about the writing just made it seem so movie of the week.  I can’t say exactly what made it feel this way but it was there.

Now I’ve made it sound like I hated the book.  I actually didn’t and to be honest I couldn’t put it down.  I really did enjoy the story and I think the characters made some important realizations and redeemed themselves in the end.  For a first novel, I think Gowda did a good job and I will be interested to see what she writes about next time.

Now, on a slightly unrelated note, I read this review on the Globe and Mail and I just have one small bone to pick.  The author of this review calls Secret Daughter chick-lit.  I know this has been a big issue in the literary world recently but I just have to add my two cents.  Why is it that just because a book is written by a woman, or for women it gets labelled chick-lit?  There are plenty of books out there written by women that are decidedly not chick-lit.  And, I’m not saying there is anything wrong with chick-lit.  I love myself some good chick-lit and there are some very talented writers that have devoted themselves to this genre.  (Nicolas Sparks, for instance…just kidding, he doesn’t write chick-lit — ha.  Actually, I was thinking more along the lines of Sophie Kinsella and Meg Cabot).  Anyway, this topic has been discussed to death in the book blogging world so I’m going to leave it at that, but seriously?  Notice how I’m not tagging this review chick-lit?

Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh

Read for: Orbis Terrarum Challenge – India

This book has been on my TBR list for a long time and I happened to see it on the shelf at the library so I decided to pick it up.  I’ve read mixed reviews so I wasn’t really sure what to expect.  Now that I’ve read it, I’m still not sure how I feel about it and I don’t even know how to summarize it!

Ghosh begins by slowing introducing you to his cast of characters (and it is quite a cast of characters).  And I say slowly because he doesn’t try and include all the characters right from the beginning, which I appreciated because there were so many.  I have to be honest, even toward the end of the book I was still having trouble keeping everybody straight.  Each of these people is destined to become a passenger on the Ibis, a former slave trading vessel, en route to Mauritius from Calcutta, India.

Ghosh takes two-thirds of this first book in a trilogy to get all of his characters onto the ship and the voyage to begin.  I’m still not sure how I feel about this.  On one hand, it seems like a lot of extra leading up to the main event of the book, but on the other hand, it really gives the reader the opportunity to really get to know and understand each of the characters and their motivations.

The book ends basically at the climax.  There is a huge build-up to this final event, but then the novel just ends.  It’s kind of like the season finale of your favourite TV show.  I was just as disappointed as when I read the first book of The Lord of the Rings for the first time.  I think I’ll most likely read the rest of the trilogy when they are available because I really do want to know what happens next.

Besides the confusion of the multiple characters, there are several languages used in the book without translations provided.  The crew on the ship speak a couple of strange dialects that I could just not follow.  In the back of the book there was a glossary, but it seemed to be kind of sporadic in the definitions it contained and I gave up on that early in the book. I could quite often figure out the basics of the meaning, but it was just extremely distracting and tedious to try to pick out some meaning from these conversations.

I’m still on the fence about this book.  I felt like it took a really long time to get interesting and start making sense because there were so many characters that came from so many different places and backgrounds and I couldn’t see how they were ever going to all come together.  (It actually was quite surprising in some cases, how they came to be aboard the Ibis in the end.)  I would have given up on this book altogether around the 250 page mark if I hadn’t already invested so much time in it!  Overall, I think I’m going to give it a 6.5/10, but after reading the rest of the trilogy, I may feel differently about this one.