Housegirl - Michael Donkor

I really wanted to like Housegirl more than I did. Perhaps it would have been easier to read rather than an audiobook. The narrator did a great job, but the accented and broken English dialogue made for a listen that required more concentration than I normally give to an audio book.

First, for a little plot. In Housegirl, Belinda is living with Auntie and Uncle in Ghana where she serves as a housemaid and mentor to another young maid in the house, Mary. Belinda is summoned, however, by friends of Aunti and Uncle to live instead in London to befriend a troubled teen, Amma. When she arrives in London, Belinda finds it difficult to adjust to life where her only role is to be a companion to Amma when she's not focused on her own studies.

Over time, Amma and Belinda begin to develop a friendship only to have it slightly implode when Belinda's conservative upbringing clashes with Amma's sexual orientation and results in a pretty terrible scene were Amma begs for kindness and Belinda gives her the opposite. This after Belinda shared with Amma the truth of her upbringing, and Amma had been soft and kind about it.

Then something else terrible happens in Ghana and Belinda has to return to deal with it, leaving the Amma/Belinda development completely unfinished. And Amma is very sweet to her again. Really, there are a lot of unraveled ends in this book that ultimately feel really unsatisfying. It stalls out when it should dig deeper.

In the end, this book could have been more.

3/5 Stars.

The Namesake - Jhumpa Lahiri

When I read the Lowland a couple years ago, I was aware that I wasn't "beginning at the beginning" so to speak when it came to Lahiri's fiction. The Lowland was a moving story of two brothers that suffered only in comparison to the fact that I had read Cutting For Stone earlier that year and I found it the superior of the "brothers" books. (You can read my review of The Lowland here).

In The Namesake, Lahiri takes on the first generation conundrum of not connecting to our parent's culture and forging ahead our own lives in the only country we know. (I say this tongue in cheek because I'm a first generation American born to Canadian parents, aside from knowing the British name for things, there have not been many challenges for me in making my own identity as an American). But for Gogol Ganguli, this transition is harsh and beautifully rendered by Lahiri through the very specific fact of Gogol's name.

Gogol is named for his father's favorite author. A stand-in name until the formal letter arrives from his great-grandmother, Gogol becomes his formal name when said letter is lost somewhere in transit from India to Massachusetts. Gogol grows up resenting his name and resenting his parents' lifestyle. When he leaves for Yale, it gives him an opportunity at crafting a new identity. He changes his name to Nikhil, a name chosen by  his parents but abandoned by Gogol in his first days of kindergarten.

He gets his first real girlfriend and tries to craft an identity through their shared interests. He studies architecture and breaks up with his college girlfriend. He moves to New York and meets another woman, wealthy and WASPish with a family home in New Hampshire and a Brownstone in the City. He loses himself in their identity. Drinking their wine, keeping their schedule. But a family tragedy makes him take stock of his choices. He thinks long and hard about how much searching for his own identity has made him unfairly reject the humanity of his own parents.

In agreeing to a date with a childhood friend, he hopes to recapture some of the legacy of his parents he has let slip away. But because Gogol's motivations are never quite his own or well crafted enough to come from an honest place, the eventual marriage is stifling and uncomfortable.

I love how well made Gogol is in the story. At some point it appears that Lahiri drifts into contemplation of Moushumi and I wonder if Lahiri wasn't a bit more taken with her than with Gogol. In the brief chapters in which she appears, Moushumi is both fuller and more vibrant than even Ashoke or Ashima, Gogol's parents.

I really do enjoy Lahiri's writing, and it's interesting coming back to her early work after reading The Lowland because her writing was so much tighter in her later novel. But as an exploration of the conflicting loyalties of a first generation child, The Namesake is both moving and clinical.

4/5 Stars.

Lucky Boy - Shanthi Sekaran

My fingers landed on this intriguing book at my library's last used book sale. And I'm so glad this book found me. I had never heard of it before, had never heard of the author either. So I went into the book with a completely open mind and neutral expectations. It completely exceeded anything I could have hoped for in an unknown pick.

Lucky Boy tells the story of two women: Solimar Valdez leaves her tiny Mexican town for a better life in America. In order to get there she has to find a bit of her own way. And it's pretty terrible the things she endures for this opportunity. Immigration and undocumented immigrants seems to be a bit of a hot topic right now (to say the least) and while this book doesn't really take a stance on the politics or legalities of the situation, it does put a very human face on a very vivid picture of suffering and indifference. 

But I digress, because also happening in this novel is a wonderful woman named Kavya who has rebelled against her traditional Indian-American immigrant mother and has struck out on her own. She's married Rishi, an environmental scientist who focuses on clean air projects at the headquarters of Weebies (re: Amazon for babies). Kavya has always gotten her way, no matter how much it displeases her mother and now she wants a baby but is having no luck. Like many, she's forced to empty her savings in order to chase this desire only to come up short time and again. 

So when Solimar (Soli) arrives in the US, her cousin helps find her a position as a house cleaner to a white Berkeley family. And Soli finds out that she has carried something else across the border, a baby, to be born in American, to be American. With only her cousin's support (sometimes begrudging), Soli works as a cleaner and then nanny to the white family after her son, Ignacio, is born. Through a series of bad breaks shortly after Ignacio turns one, Soli is arrested and the boy is put into foster care as her case winds through immigration. Except, well our system for housing, detaining and deporting immigrants is woefully bereft of accountability and efficiency. 

Enter Kavya and Rishi, recently determined to be foster parents as an alternative to continued IVF cycles. When they meet Ignacio, Kavya is instantly bonded to him. He eventually comes to live with them and Kavya puts her whole heart into loving and becoming Ignacio's mother. When she finds out his birth mother, Soli, very much wants her son back, Kavya decides she can fight through the courts, for custody of Ignacio. 

There are bad guys in this story, but it's not Soli or Kavya. They both love Ignacio fiercely and the crux of the book is what is to be done for Ignacio. The story line reminded me somewhat of Light Between Oceans where two mothers yearn for one child. I've never struggled with infertility and I've never had the opportunity to love someone else's child like Kavya, but I found her relatable and sympathetic, despite not agreeing with her position regarding Ignacio. 

The two women in the story are so well written. I'll have to look for more works by Shanthi Sekaran. This book was very well done.

4/5 Stars. 

The Buddha in the Attic - Julie Otsuka

This excellent short book was more poetry than prose. There's no main character in The Buddha in the Attic, which tells the collective stories of young women brought from Japan in the 1930s to wed men they had never met. Promised lives of ease and comfort in America, most of these women were gravely disappointed, but scratched out a life in the fields of California's agriculture industry until they saved enough (or didn't) to buy a piece of land of their own. 

Or they married shop keepers in the J-towns of the cities in which they arrived and lived their lives serving other Japanese immigrants within a small tight-knit community. Or they served as housemaids to oblivious, or caring, or cruel white people. 

And they had children that died, farmed, prospered, and left them (or didn't). And then they were awarded for their hard work by being rounded up and transported to camps on suspicion of enemy activity. And there their story ends and is taken up by the white people who didn't notice the Japanese until they were gone, carrying forth a half-hearted effort to get answers from the government as to the disappearance of their neighbors.

This little book was so well written and lovely and sad. I really enjoyed it.

4/5 Stars. 

Brooklyn - Colm Tóibín

I'd give this book a solid 3.75 stars. I liked Eilis (pronounced Eye-lish). I liked watching her "come of age" through the process of the book. I like how she makes decisions and isn't overly dramatic or needlessly whiny. She accepts her choices like an adult and makes the next step.

In this story, Eilis is the younger daughter to a widowed mother in Ireland. Smart, but slightly less beautiful than her older sister Rose, Eilis works hard at her studies trying to advance herself and her family's fortunes. When it becomes apparent that there is no work for Eilis in Ireland, her sister and mother make arrangements for Eilis to go to Brooklyn to work in a shop and hopefully take classes to become a book keeper. 

Eilis suffers through a rough crossing, but once in America, gets on well at her job and eventually makes friends. She begins a relationship with an Italian plumber named Tony and corresponds with her sister Rose in secret because she's not quite ready to tell her mother that she's moved on from Ireland. Part of the time Eilis seems like she's inhabiting someone else's life in America, as if she's going through the motions of her day without thinking of who she is becoming. But eventually she starts to make decisions of her own and use her intellect to excel at school. 

Following Rose's death, Eilis must decide if she will go back to Ireland to stay, or if she'll claim the new life she's made for herself in Brooklyn. In a very real question of whether you can go home again, Eilis is presented with what her alternative life would have been had she stayed in Ireland. And she has regrets on both sides of the decision. 

Understated, yet understandable, the story of Eilis is the story of us all, growing up, making decisions, living with the consequences and deciding our own futures. The only complaints were some fairly plodding points in the story that got a little boring, and the fact that nothing ever seems to really happen to Eilis. The lack of drama makes it realistic, but sometimes a bit tedious.

3.75/5 Stars.