Review: Secrets And Saris by Shoma Narayanan

After reading The One She Was Warned About I wanted to check out another book by Narayanan. Secrets & Saris surprised me by being having some fairly controversial content. Shefali Khanna is a recently jilted bride overseeing a child care center in a new town. Neil Mitra is a television personality with too much baggage to start a new relationship. This is a conventional start for Harlequin so I wasn't prepared for where the story went. Narayanan bit off more than the page length allowed her to fully chew. The relationship between Shefali and Neil felt as though I were watching them through a zoetrope, their conflicts circling back as quickly as they'd cleared.

Shefali is a very traditional woman. She was prepared for an arranged (but not hasty) marriage when her fiancé leaves her at the altar. Never having planned for a life beyond wife and mother, she breaks with her family to explore what she wants from life. Shefali is confident, capable and engaging. She also ends up with a HEA despite her best efforts. Shefali spends way too much time telling Neil what he thinks, feels or wants and far too little time protecting herself. She repeatedly agrees to things she knows will make her unhappy. Passive aggressive might be her middle name.

Mills & Boon cover

For his part, Neil is an enigma. His heritage is brushed over as irrelevant, except for two odd scenes. The first, an obvious plot device, involves him not being expected to understand Bengali. The second has Shefali ruminating that Neil's mother appears more culturally conservative than her own. This was a point I would have liked to explore. Neil's family was less traditional than Shefali's, so why did she interpret Neil's mother that way? Was it only her clothing, or was it in the fetish/appropriation sense? In a way Neil serves the same role the half-Indian hero does in most of his appearances. His heritage makes him mildly exotic without informing much of his personality or the plot. Unlike most, Neil is culturally identified as Indian, not English.

The major conflict between Shefali and Neil involves abortion. I suppose you could say it's Shefali's uncertainty about Neil's commitment or their inability to fully express their feelings. I'd disagree. Neil's hangups are tied directly to children, as are Shefali's. She's ready to start a family and he is not. Shefali decides to marry Neil with the hope of changing his mind over time. (Oh honey, no.) In the end I admired Secrets & Saris more than I enjoyed it. While I liked the ambition, at the book's close too much was swept aside. 

Spoiler Zone: Neil has a child from prior relationship. He pressured his former partner into having the child instead of terminating the pregnancy. Shefali is surprised he is raising his daughter alone, apparently expecting Neil to have then asked a female relative to raise her. Although a devoted father, Neil decides not to have more children. Narayanan lightly touches on how Neil feels entitled to dictate how both women use their wombs but shies away from the point by book's end.

*This review originally appeared at Love In The Margins.

Review: She Left Me The Gun by Emma Brockes

I want you to read this book. It's going to win a basket of awards. It's the memoir of the year, for certain. I don't care who writes a memoir this year, Brockes has the top spot sewn up. There are some second half issues and the author occasionally loses her way but it doesn't matter. Because this book is everything. She Left Me The Gun is about the complexity of the mother / daughter relationship. It's about clashes of culture and class. It's about the inability to have cross generational understanding until one of the parties has gone. The questions come too late, the understanding of what we didn't know part of the hole left in the leaving.

Brockes and her mother speak different languages. They come from different countries, homes, classes and times. The thing that holds them together is the parent child bond, something Brockes mother has had to create from whole cloth. I found She Left Me The Gun compelling because Brockes is very clear eyed about her own reactions. She sees where she resisted when her mother would allude to her life. She sees the involuntary judgements she makes on her distant family as she meets them. Brockes is aware that she has not lived the experiences they have, that she is unknowingly shaped by them but apart from them.  There is a passage midway through the book between Brockes and a friend that I think (by it's inclusion) sums her self awareness up.

"Fascists under our bonnet," I say to Pooly. 

"Yeah," she says. "Be grateful you're not the black one."

By the time the third biker pulls over we are so numb to the situation that when he takes his helmet off and turns out to be a woman, with long blonde hair and a weather beaten face, the relief hardly registers. - Emma Brockes

Brockes gets many of the small details right. She understands that she cannot, on a fundamental level, understand. The rules of her world don't apply to those of her mother or her mother's siblings. In the same way that she was a British daughter of a South African woman so too is she the protected child of an unprotected parent. Some gulfs of experience cannot be filled, they can only be bridged. Ultimately, Brockes is writing a letter of love and respect to her mother and in so doing she offers a unique insight to what it is like to be successfully raised by an abuse survivor. Too many memoirs focus solely on  unbroken cycles while the world itself offers far more possibility. 

Review: Dead Ever After by Charlaine Harris

I pushed Dead Ever After up the TBR list to answer one question and one question only. "Can 437 one star reviews be wrong?" The answer is yes, yes they can. I liked Dead Ever After as much as any chapter in the Sookie Stackhouse series. Harris is the nickelodeon of popular authors. You drop your penny in and she slowly starts moving. You know what you're going to hear. It's not the smoothest or most polished rendition, but it's reliable and recognizable. Before you're ready she's ground to a halt and everything is silent.

So yes, I think Dead Ever After is not only a fitting end to the Sookie Stackhouse saga but also the only ending (short of Sookie's death) that fits the trajectory of the series. I worried Sookie would never get here, I worried Harris was taking so many side roads she'd get lost, but eventually she worked it out. I could review the book properly, but Robin/Janet has covered most of the points I'd make. I am far more interested in those 437 (and counting) one star reviews, as well as the passion driving down votes of positive reviews.

"To be honest, I would have been more satisfied had Eric kidnapped Sookie determined to turn her against her will"

"He is left emasculated and victimized."

"Like Harris' main character, Sookie Stackhouse, I, as a reader, feel raped, abused, and betrayed."

"I think you got personally offended by your fans LOVE OF ERIC. So you don't want them to be a couple instead you want Sookie to be a narrow minded racist"

"He was the knight on the white horse, always there to protect her."

"but coouldn't she be artificially inseminated and still be Eric's wife???"

"Charlaine Harris KNEW the majority of her fans read this book series because WE ALL LOVED ERIC AND SOOKIE!!! KNEW IT!!! And did she care? No. She just wrote what she wanted. "

Within the series Sookie frequently showed contempt for the Fangbangers. These are humans who hang around vampires hoping to be turned, hoping to be fed upon, hoping that the vampires will fleetingly notice them. Sookie herself is a Fangbanger, something she doesn't initially realize. Her relationships with Bill and Eric are abusive. They pass her around like a party favor. They save her from situations they created. (These situations often benefited them.) Because Eric is written as attractive (George Wickham in The Lizzie Bennett Diaries?) and says pretty things when he needs to, Sookie gives him a pass. On the page Eric is ruthless and power hungry. Other vampires fear him. He sets up multiple controls over Sookie's emotions and person while assuring her he respects her agency. He withholds information. He expects to be her priority while keeping her his option. Eric's power grab is presented to Sookie as out of his control, yet he not only does nothing to stop it he negotiates multiple benefits to himself. Eric ends the book in a position of expanding power while Sookie ends the book having refused to be his piece on the side. She has come to understand which of her relationships are toxic and which are truly supportive. Sookie places a value on herself that she long denied. In doing so she sees the esteem others hold her in. It's a classic coming of age story.

Sookie was never a good match for a vampire. She loves the sun. She wants to do the right thing, even when she doesn't know what that is. She craves family and tradition and shuns political power games. She is a Christian down to her toes. While she is attracted to the novelty of the vampire world it's daily reality repels her. When Sookie takes stock of what makes her happy, where she finds contentment, it becomes clear that the undead can't provide it. Many readers are reacting to this rejection as a rejection of them by the writer. ("She just wrote what she wanted.") I am pleased that what Harris wanted to write was a woman recognizing her own value.

The abusive (but loving) hero is a popular narrative in romance. Readers who respond to it emotionally will excuse away any action by the hero. "He did it for her own good. He was protecting her. He had no choice. He really loves her, though. In the end, he saved her. She is different from those other girls. He just had to find the right person." It is a rare book that examines the psychology and structure of domestic abuse. The common fictional answer is that if the heroine will just love him enough then he will change. Because love is magic. I appreciate that for all her structural flaws (and Harris will admit she has them) she loved Sookie more than Team Eric did. Harris has shown the predator in Eric and Bill all along, it is Sookie and the reader who refused to see it.