Book Review: LUCKY BOY

Title: Lucky Boy

Author: Shanthi Sekaran

Publisher: GP Putnam's Sons

Pages: 480

This is the story of the sun and the wind and the child they bore. This is the story of the sun and the wind, dragged aground by the meddlesome earth.

Those are the closing lines of Lucky Boy by Shanthi Sekaran, and they will only make sense at the end of this emotion-filled book that wrung me out.

Reading Lucky Boy was like being in the embrace of home. Between Indian culture, where my roots lie, and Spanish culture, which strangely I have always felt at home in, it felt as if I knew the two women who are mothers to the same boy.

Eighteen-year-old Mexican Solimar ‘Soli’ Castro Valdez dreams of a better life. Her parents scrounge up the money required to send her off with Manuel, an acquaintance who has promised to spirit her illegally over the border into the United States of America, the magical land of dreams.

On the way, Soli meets Checo, a boy not over 20. She senses that he was the wind that would carry her north. And so she escapes from Manuel who wants her to smuggle drugs into the US. For a brief ten days, she lives a heady life with Checo and his friends, riding the top of a moving train. Checo warns her that if she falls off the moving train, she will be carne molida, ground meat. In spite of the danger, she learns to slip feathers into the cushions of their futures.

Before they reach America, they are separated. Soli reaches Berkeley, and meets her cousin, Silvia, who finds her a job as a nanny at a rich home. Soli learns she is pregnant, but refuses abortion, suspecting that it must be Checo’s. Her happiness was terrain pitted with melancholy.

Meanwhile, Kavya, an Indian American woman, and her husband Rishi have tried and failed to get pregnant. Kavya’s own mother makes her feel a failure. In a culture in which mothers brag about their offspring’s achievements, Kavya has nothing, neither achievement nor offspring.

Kavya longs for motherhood, even when a friend warns her, They will suck away your time, your body, your mind, your sleep, your plans – everything you wanted to do. Gone. You will be a dry husk of your former self… You, as you know it? Over. She tells herself that she wanted a self of herself, a child.

Once Ignacio ‘Nacho’ is born, Soli’s confidence with motherhood runs concurrent with Kavya’s inability to do so. Soli tells Nacho stories about Checo, who is built into Soli’s memories. When you have just one possession, you guard it with your life. The you that once centered your universe becomes nothing but a keeper of the one precious thing.

Soli’s goal is to lie low and escape police attention. Say the word government to an immigrant with no papers and all you get is a system wide shutdown” silence, and the faint hum of fear. But when Silvia jumps a stop sign, both come under the notice of the police. Soli is found to be an illegal and is taken to detention, while Nacho is sent to foster care.

Kavya and Rishi take in Ignacio as part of the foster care programme. Kavya becomes the singing, story-telling, inventor-of-the-universe kind of mother, even though she has no real claim to the child. Even though she knows Iggy’s mother will return. Even though her mother warns her in a makeshift, made-to-order proverb, when you make dal for another woman’s child, keep it a little bit raw. 

Kavya isn't going to take her advice and builds her love on a fault line. But Soli is not about to give up her child, and for Kavya and Rishi, The first tremors had begun. The couple fight, believing Iggy’s future will be best with them. Will Iggy remain with the Reddys or will he be restored to Soli?

The writing, when Shanthi was talking about Soli’s village, felt lazy and languid. Then it acquired a sense of urgency when talking about Soli’s life.

The stories of Soli and Kavya come to us in alternate chapters.

At heart, both are immigrant women. The only difference is that Soli is undocumented while Kavya was born on American soil.

Soli has her American dream and Kavya has an insatiable dream to be a mother. And it seems that both are forced to suffer in their desire to attain their dreams.

At the wedding of Preeti Patel, Kavya’s overachieving childhood friend, she is surrounded by several aging women of Indian origin, all of them intent on knowing about details of her life they really have no right to know. Like gulls thrown a crust of bread, they frenzied around her, their voices rising to shrieks. Ah, I know the truth of that line from experience.

I was particularly touched by Shanthi’s description of motherhood – To love profoundly, and be loved. To shape her own blood and body into sparkling new life. She could be home to someone, a safe and soft place in a world of ragged edges.

It is a world that Kavya is denied, first by an inability to conceive, and when she does, through miscarriage. To a childless mother, it appears that other parents are artisans of a dying craft.

Shanthi’s reference to the irony of American mothers speaking French to their American children, fathers explaining the physics of under-ground transport to their preschoolders appealed to me. I am an Indian mother who tries to speak Spanish to her Indian children. ☺

Both mothers weave their reasons for existence around Ignacio. Soli is denied her right to motherhood on account of her illegal status, while Kavya struggles to retain her hold on Iggy.

The symbolism is evident in the shape sorter, the toy that requires children to fit shapes into holes. Iggy puts the right shape into the right hole, while Kavya as a child never could. Even as a grownup, it appears that she is forcing things where they do not belong.

Generally, I found Soli’s story more appealing than Kavya’s. They are both finely etched characters, with well written stories. Both move us as readers and hold our attention, but Soli’s struggles and the sheer intensity of the horrors she goes through staked the greater claim on my loyalty. I wished that Shanthi would restore both Nacho and Checo to her.

The book raises questions about who is a real mother and we realise that a mother is the one who gives birth as much as the one who brings up a child with love.

However, a child is not a thing that can be shared, and so in the end, only one mother has Ignacio completely to herself. I won’t say which one, only that the resolution felt deeply right.

This is one book I’d like to read again.

(I got a free ARC from FirstToRead).

Book Review: UNKEPT

Title: Unkept
Author: Ericka Clay
Publisher: Bannerwing Books
Pages: 257

I wondered why Ericka had not called the book, Broken, since that was what most of the characters were, bruised and broken. But I supposed, Unkept worked just as well. I wondered what it stood for though. Did it mean a mess, something that wasn’t kept well?

The cover revealed nothing. In an age of designer book covers, it was stark and plain. Just the title and the author’s name, giving us no indication of what to expect, and taking away our right to judge its merit by its cover.

The book alternates between the first person present tense account of Vienna Oaks and the third person past tense account of Heather Hammel, her childhood nemesis. The alternating POVs don’t always take the story forward. Instead they retrace the same experiences from differing viewpoints.

The trouble with choosing different styles for both was that it got me unconsciously supporting Vienna over Heather. I don’t know if Ericka meant that to happen, or if she merely wished to set the two viewpoints apart.

The setting is established in the first few pages. We come to know that it is a funeral home, from the sweet smell of formaldehyde and the body of a five-year-old that initiates an upheaval in the mind of Vienna. It is amazing how the needs and complexities of life constantly buzz and swarm even in the backdrop of a funeral home, a reminder of how the circle of life and death is so entwined within itself.

We begin the novel by seeing Heather and Vienna as their pregnancy hormones wreak havoc in their lives. Both are now grown up, but the shadow of grade school still hangs heavily over both of them. Both women are psychologically bruised, and have a physically or mentally absent father, a mother with severe issues, and of course, Wyland. Married to Heather, Wyland no longer loves her. He is incapable of staying committed to either woman.

It is hard to describe the plot but I will try my best. Through the writing, you sense the dysfunction of this family across generations. Vienna’s dead mother with a severe alcohol addiction, her grandmother who blames Vienna, her dad’s affair with Loretta (Dad’s yellowing stationery to Loretta’s neon Post-it note), and her grandfather in prison. And a secret that Vienna has kept repressed for years.

Between the troubled family members, the children feel hemmed in on all sides. Vienna battles life, nervous and anxious, while Troy, her brother, drops out of civilized life. As Vienna observes, Dirt and time have made their beds in his pores.

At age 15, Troy sleeps with 13-year-old Rosa, Vienna’s best friend, and leaves her pregnant. Rosa becomes an unwed teenage mother. It is another example of the wrong personal choices that the characters make, one that reprises itself when Maya, Rosa’s daughter with Troy, also becomes pregnant in her teens.

Heather carries her own issues. Her childhood saw her father leave her and her filth- and vermin-loving mother to set up house with another woman. Distressed, Heather seeks to rebuild her self-esteem by torturing other kids in the sixth grade.

As grownups, Vienna has an affair, which results in pregnancy, with her one-time best friend, Wyland, now Heather’s husband, a man who cannot stay committed to any woman. Heather too is pregnant with Wyland’s child. When Heather’s mother dies, she chooses Oaks Funeral Home to complete the formalities.

Slowly Heather and Vienna gravitate towards each other, bound by their pregnancies, and their burdensome past and complicated present. Their attitude towards their mothers informs their lives, as Ericka observes through Vienna’s voice: There’s nothing extinguishable about the burning roots that connect a mother to her child.

It takes a while to figure out who is who, because Ericka establishes the relationships and the circumstances in the best way possible: from the inside out. The relationships are all complicated and twisted, leaning into one another.

The friendship between Vienna and Rosa is beautifully described. Even though we don’t get her point of view, and therefore know nothing about the pain she feels when Vienna wounds her feelings, she still comes across as rock solid, forgiving and loving, standing up against Heather’s bullying, and fiercely protective of Vienna.

The healing power of confession which Vienna experiences with Rosa as a child is something she has need of, even as a grownup. What mattered was wringing my soul dry like a dirty washcloth and feeling the quiet smoothing over every raw nerve. That is how Vienna explains the act of playing confession time with Rosa. It is a line that struck me at the end of the story, making the otherwise hard-to-accept conclusion easier to accept. A closing that provided closure to Vienna.

While Rosa offers healing, Vienna’s Gram is bacon in a pan snapping hot oil against my ear, and just like that you feel the sizzling in your own mind.

The writing is sensual. We taste the words as we read, and stop and think about the implications of each line. Vienna thinks about herself stooping to her Gram’s level and how it is not that great a drop. In another instance, she says, the chips and nicks are time scraped perfunctorily into the wood.

The flashbacks are truly seamless, and we traverse the distance between past and present as effortlessly as the characters themselves. Bit by bit, Ericka peels off layer after layer. Heather’s cruelty is there, magnified when set against the fact that she stole Wyland away from Vienna. Heather is not mean the way Hollywood portrays it, but her cruelty pecks away at a girl with severe anxiety issues.

The characters are all complicated, as is the writing. Don’t pick up this book, if easy reading is what you are looking for. Readers must be prepared to make an investment on their own part in order to get the best out of this book. But that is what all good books demand of readers, and good readers are more than willing to oblige.

Ericka handles her material well. She knows how to turn the cushion inside out so the hurt and the embarrassment can stay hidden.

I found her choice of words most interesting. Often the usage is far removed from tradition. For example, the soap…flirted with the air. Elsewhere, miscarriage is described as the pain in my womb healing without my consent.

Ericka’s style can bring out the laughs just as you are reading something deathly serious. But as Vienna says, There is nothing funny about the truth. 

The author is matter-of-fact about everyone, whether they are in pain, or whether they are doing something wrong. There is no judgement.

The women are all strong, even when they are faced with the fickleness of the men. Vienna and Heather who love a man who does not love them as much. Loretta who cares for Vienna’s father and his children even though she cannot expect a ring in return. Vienna’s mother, Louise, and Heather’s mother, Caroline, in the face of their addiction and issues. Rosa, who finds herself pregnant at 13 and Vienna’s Gram, whose husband is arrested and imprisoned. It is the men who are unable to keep their promises.

Unkept brings out the fact that grief and the need for forgiveness and redemption are universal. The novel brings up a number of issues. How adults can mess up children’s lives at home, as well as the insidious effects of bullying. About the pain of ruptured relationships and the delicious release that comes of forgiving and mending the rupture.

I understood the meaning of Unkept in the last paragraph, when Vienna thinks being this free is almost harder to bear than being kept.

Reading Unkept left me feeling a little exhausted as if I had lived all those conflicting and troubled lives. I hope you’re convinced to read it too.