Book Review: The Secret Daughter

I am fairly sure that Shilpi Somaya Gowda's The Secret Daughter will end up on my Top 10 list for 2011. I was riveted from the very first page and totally satisfied with the ending. What gets better than that? Ah yes, Gowda's writing is great, too. This isn't just a satisfying plot read.

The book opens with a young Indian woman, Kavita, giving birth to a daughter. She knows her husband will dispose of the baby, so she escapes to the city to give her to the orphanage. On the other side of the world, Somer and Krishnan, both doctors, struggle with infertility. We see it coming, right? Somer and Krishnan adopt a beautiful girl from an Indian orphanage, and the story moves on from there.

The book then alternates between the lives of Somer, Krishnan and Asha, a privileged American family struggling to stay together; and Kavita and Jasu, whose life is full of hardship and, for Kavita, a constant sense of loss and longing for her daughter. Asha eventually makes her way back to India on a prestigious fellowship, and through her work there, she gains understanding of who she is and who her parents really are.

I absolutely loved this debut novel and look forward to reading whatever Shilpi Somaya Gowda has coming up next.

Thanks to S. Krishna's Books for the recommendation!

Other Bloggers Review The Secret Daughter
Helen's Book Blog
Luxury Reading
CaribousMom
The Book Chick

The Sunday Salon: July in Review

Books Read in July
The Little Giant of Aberdeen County: LOVED
The Wednesday Sisters: Nah.
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot: Fabulous
Irresistible Revolution by Shane Claiborne: Pretty good.
The Secret Daughter: LOVED!

Read in May/June but Reviewed Finally in July
Climbing the Stairs: enjoyable!
A Room with a View: lovely
Nanny Returns: Nope.
My Name Is Mary Sutter: Read it, NOW!

Favorite Book of the Month
Oh boy. Must I pick? Secret Daughter, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, and The Little Giant of Aberdeen County were all fantastic. I can't choose.

Mid-Year Review
See my favorite books of the year thus far!

Currently Reading
Shadow Tag by Louise Erdrich. Dark and disturbing thus far.

Added to My Ever-Growing TBR List
*Dry Grass of August by Anna Jean Mayhew
*Forgotten Garden by Kate Morton (reviewed at Redlady's Reading Room)
*Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi
*Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich
*The Soldier's Wife by Margaret Leroy (reviewed at Polishing Mud Balls)
* The Tiger's Wife by Tea Obreht

Books-to-Movies Watched
Eat, Pray, Love. B-o-r-i-n-g. Watched the movie before I read the book; therefore, crossed the book off my TBR list.

Coming Up
How To Read Literature Like a Professor by Thomas Foster
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson (re-read)
The German Woman by Paul Griner
The Queen's Daughter by Susan Coventry
Looking for Salvation at the Dairy Queen by Susan Gregg Gilmore
The Secret Life of CeeCee Wilkes by Diane Chamberlain
The Judas Field by Howard Bahr

Top 3 Most Visited Reviews This Month on SmallWorld Reads
Snowflower and the Secret Fan
Frankenstein
The Postmistress

Thanks to the Top 3 Referring Blogs
Rebecca Reads
Semicolon
Cindy's Book Club

Book Review: The Little Giant of Aberdeen County

The Little Giant of Aberdeen County was an impulse check-out at the library, and somehow I always score well when I have the rare opportunity to peruse the to-be-shelved (i.e., just returned) books. I don't know why this book never made it to my TBR list, but I'm glad I stumbled upon it! Tiffany Baker is a wonderful writer, and this novel is full of surprises.

Truly starts life out in a big way—so big, in fact, that her mother dies in childbirth. Truly grows at a tremendous rate (turns out to be a pituitary gland glitch) and soon outgrows her older sister, the beautiful Serena. They go through childhood as the beauty and the beast, for Truly is as ugly as she is big.

Eventually they are orphaned and split up: Truly goes to live with an impoverished family in the country, and Serena lives a privileged life in town. Woven into the story of Truly and Serena is the doctor, Robert Morgan and his son, also Dr. Robert Morgan, and their great-great grandmother, Tabitha, the witch doctor.

This novel has everything in it: mystery, romance, magic, and a fantastic story line.

Other reviews of The Little Giant of Aberdeen County:
The Book Lady's Blog
Caribous Mom
Bookopolis
Planet Books
Maw Books

Linked up with The Saturday Review of Books

Book Review: The Wednesday Sisters

I put this book on my TBR list because I guess some blogger really liked it and gave it a resounding review. Yep, so, I'm glad somebody really liked it. Oh, it wasn't terrible. There was one part that even brought a tear to my eye. But mostly I just found the particular narrative style of the novel hokey, unbelievable, and therefore faintly irritating.

So The Wednesday Sisters by Meg Waite Clayton is about a group of moms who find each other and become lifelong friends. There is a stereotype for each mom: the jock, the southern belle, the brain, the depressed, the unfulfilled. And the setting is fraught with potential: 1968 in Palo Alto, California. So somehow these women manage to somehow be privy to, whether via TV or in real life, every huge event that happens in the 60s and 70s. You name it, they experience it: women's rights, war protests, assassination of the Robert Kennedy, man walking on the moon, the beginning of the computer era. They witness way too much. And tragedies of all kinds happen to them, as well: infidelity, infertility, cancer, squashed dreams.

To top it all off, they all decide to be writers. A couple of them even have best sellers. I don't know. The novel just felt so very contrived, and I just couldn't get past that they all shared these huge historical moments together as young mothers and had deep philosophical discussions about the events. Seriously? I don't know how that works.

You might want to use this book as a filler between heavier books. Once you start reading it, you will want to know what happens to the characters and why one of them wears white gloves all the time, so you'll probably keep reading it. Afterwards, you'll might wonder why you kept reading it— or maybe that's just me.

Linked up with The Saturday Review of Books

Book Review: A Room with a View

Ah, what's to be said about this E.M. Forster classic that hasn't been said already? Published in 1908, Forster paints the painfully restrictive, often silly middle-class English life of Lucy Honeychurch. Lucy wants more than what is expected of her, more than what the social mores of the time allow. She wants a life with a view.

Forster presents the Honeychurches and their community as pillars of all that is good and noble among Englishmen, and he presents the Emmersons, the unconventional, erratic foils to the Honeychurhces. Lucy is doomed to shake loose of convention from the moment George Emmerson kisses her. It just takes her awhile.

Satire, wit, romance: it's all here. It's been 25 years or more since I last read A Room with a View, and now I'm going to get comfy, pull up Netflix, and watch the movie again. Sometimes 1908 is a much, much better place to be.

The Sunday Salon: Mid-year Review

So far this year I've read 23 books and have (thus far) reviewed 19 of them. I've also read another half-dozen or so juvenile fiction books with the kids and/or for literature classes I teach.

Here are my reviews so far:

• A Far Country (Daniel Mason)***
• Amy and Isabelle (Elizabeth Strout)****
• Bloodroot (Amy Greene)*****
• Born Under a Lucky Moon (Dana Precious)****
• Climbing the Stairs (Padma Venkatraman)***
• Diary, The (Eileen Goudge)***
• Double Bind (Chris Bohjalian)****
• Frankenstein (Mary Shelley)****
• Geography of Bliss (Eric Weiner)***
• March (Geraldine Brooks)****
• Mennonite in a Little Black Dress (Rhoda Janzen)****
• Murder on the Orient Express (Agatha Christie)***
• My Name Is Mary Sutter (Robin Oliveira)*****
• Nanny Returns (McLaughlin and Kraus) **
• New Stories from the South, 2010**
• On Agate Hill (Lee Smith)***
• Postmistress, The (Sarah Blake)****
• Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen)*****
• Remains of the Day (Kazuo Ishiguro)****

There have been some really, really good ones in the first half of 2011. My Top 5 (not in any particular order) are:

My Name Is Mary Sutter (Robin Oliveira)
Bloodroot (Amy Greene)
March (Geraldine Brooks)
Remains of the Day (Kazuo Ishiguro)
Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen)

There are some other contenders for the Top 10 list among the books I've read so far this year, but perhaps those other spots will go to books to be read in the next six months.

What's at the top of your list so far for 2011?

Book Review: Climbing the Stairs

Padma Venkatraman offers yet another perspective on World War II in Climbing the Stairs— that of an Indian family whose lives are forever altered during the Indian struggle for independence.

Vidya is a 15-year-old girl who wants to further her education rather than following the traditional route of arranged marriage. Her mother is resistant but her father agrees that she should go to college. Before anything can be formally arranged, however, her father is permanently brain damaged during a riot. Vidya and her family must move into her grandfather's home, where they are treated little better than servants.

Ultimately Vidya's grandfather allows her a bit of freedom, and Vidya can occasionally escape the oppressive life of a woman in a strict Brahmin family. In some ways, this book reminded me of Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis. A strange comparison, I know, but the protagonists in the novels have such similar personalities and drives.

Climbing the Stairs ends satisfactorily, which I like. I highly recommend adding this to any World War 2 era reading list. You can see my WWII list here and visit War Through the Generations for many more.

(Thanks to S. Krishna's Books for the initial recommendation.)