Synopsis: Five girls. Three generations. One great American love story.
Ranee, worried that her children are losing their Indian culture; Sonia, wrapped up in a forbidden biracial love affair; Tara, seeking the limelight to hide her true self; Shanti, desperately trying to make peace in the family; Anna, fighting to preserve her Bengali identity.
Review: You Bring the Distant Near is a breathtaking book about a family from India as each member learns what being Indian really means to them. This book covers a family for multiple generations as we get to see what aspects of Indian culture they reject or keep close. Each character in this book was incredible. From the moment we are introduced to Sonia and Tara, I was hooked in their world. I loved seeing how close Sonia and Tara were, but they had very different opinions on how they should look. Tara did everything in her power to not be Indian, especially when the family moved to America and she took social cues from The Brady Bunch. Sonia, on the other hand, loved her dark skin and found beauty in her natural self. This book does an incredible job of highlighting how different peoples opinions can be despite being from the same family.
As we get further into the story, we see that there is more here than just being introduced to a family. We see the cultural struggles they face as they experience the September 11 attack, and we see them fall in love. Either with other people, or they fall in love with themselves. It was sad, but interesting to see how against dark skinned people Ranee was. Her distaste for anyone with black skin was heart breaking, but I think it's also important to see how black people are treated by other cultures. I would just be very careful for anyone who is black and reads this book. The overall story is beautiful, but there could be many hurtful scenes in here. My only complaint is that I wish we got to spend more time with Shanti and Anna. This book is not long and more than half of it was about Sonia and Tara. While I did feel like Shanti and Anna were fleshed out, I just wanted to spend more time with them. This book could have been 1000+ pages long and I would have happily read every bit of it. It was a truly incredible read.
5 howls
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