Mother Land: A Novel

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Swati, Dhruv's mother, sees a new way of life in the relationship her son has with his wife so she decides to leave her husband and be able to live life the way she wants to. She didn’t know how to put the two realities together, in her mind, so she picked the one she preferred because it had sepia tones and 1930s costumes. I enjoyed the examination of biases on Indian culture and the descriptions of the country from a Western perspective and how they differ from that of a person born and raised in India.

One can read Mother Land, then, in a state of appalled fascination, the transgression of full-on family hatred licensed, but also safely displaced on to another family. They examine how women carved out space within movements such as temperance and track the fluctuating fortunes of women's employment and domestic life from the Great War to the eve of the Second World War.Fifi’s social schedule is packed and she has a job she enjoys; she and her husband explore Mumbai and make it theirs. She lives and works in Washington, DC, and she enjoys yoga, coffee, and her small dog friend, Sassafras.

She is the author of the chapbooks Translation (Paper Nautilus, 2019, winner of the 2018 Vella Chapbook Prize), Tropicália (Newfound, forthcoming, winner of the 2020 Newfound Prose Prize) and Amblyopia (forthcoming, Bull City Press - INCH micro-chapbook series). Sure, now you’re verging on broke and holed up in a mildly entropic corner of Cape Cod (Jay rather than Paul, who pings between Massachusetts and Hawaii when not on farther-flung trips), but this deliberately downbeat assessment of imaginary others’ assessment seems an act of projection and self-protection too far.Franqui handles these conflicts deftly, keeping the mood of the book light, without undermining the seriousness of her topic.

repetitive: in the beginning, she establishes Rachel and Swati through evident distinguishing factors simply in the way the two speak and interact and live and dress and everything, but this would only be purposeful and appropriate for the beginning and the beginning only; throughout the story, over halfway through the book, the author seemed to keep pestering the reader by repeating the cultural differences that we already know? By the time the plot takes off in the novel's final quarter, when a friend of Rachel’s visiting Mumbai forces her to confront hard truths about her choices and Swati finds a love interest, it’s too late. Throughout the book, Rachel (protagonist) was portrayed as “an independent and loving spirit with a curious mind. And it must have seemed that I was writing stories, book reviews, novels, travel books, magazine articles, essays, newspaper columns, more novels, more stories, another travel book. She reported on the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, the COVID-19 pandemic and has reported from the field on malaria, HIV, and TB.Let me also clear that “𝙎𝙡𝙪𝙢𝙙𝙤𝙜 𝙈𝙞𝙡𝙡𝙞𝙤𝙣𝙖𝙞𝙧𝙚” DOES NOT DEFINE INDIA WHICH IS MADE BY A BRITISH DIRECTOR. She is a Puerto Rican Jewish American who lives in Mumbai with her Kolkata-born husband, and her perspective informs her latest novel. While I enjoyed having a 'tour' through Mumbai, I didn't get as deep a sense of the city as I would have liked, but I think that might be harder to do with contemporary fiction over historical fiction. When she tells Jay that she can’t read his latest book because it isn’t in large print like all the bestsellers, it is a paper-cut of derision. I had hoped to love this story about a young USAmerican woman who married an Indian man and moved with him to Mumbai then had to learn how to navigate her new life in India and her new, unintended relationship with her mother-in-law.

This is a joint issue with Rachel and Dhruv - she puts herself in the position by seeking decisiveness externally, but he creates a whole problem on his own by trying to have one foot in both worlds but his mind in only one of them. She has recently ventured into the art of photography and lives in the South Sound Region of Washington State.And when Eleanor meets widower Peter and his daughter, Martina, a new, more peaceful life seems possible. She is a playwright and the recipient of the 2013 Goldberg Playwriting Award, and also wrote a web series for which she received the Alfred Sloan Foundation Screenwriting award (aftereverafterwebseries. At its very end the narrative veers unexpectedly into magic realism as Dimitri has a final encounter in Istanbul with his long-dead mother.