A foreword, family chart, and photographs help in anchoring the reader to the narrative. The simple linear chronicle is narrated for the most part in a detached, anthropological voice with its own charm (“Some babies were happy to be massaged. Others screamed bloody murder”), even when describing dramatic events like living in a jungle to avoid the plague epidemic, the death of a woman from “in-law harassment,” or the horrors of a difficult childbirth, where the midwife asks the family “mother or baby?” and proceeds to save the life of one according to the answer.
Except when writing of her own father and of Kaki Aie, her widowed aunt, who took care of the author and her sister after their mother’s death, the author sticks to this matter-of-fact tone. The author’s sister Kunda is more forthcoming in her reminiscence about Kaki Aie where she opines that maybe the two sisters were a form of protection for the young widow, as Kaki Aie would shake her awake at night if someone knocked at their bedroom door sending the unwelcome visitor scurrying away. Death during childbirth or in the marital home was a fact of life, a truth driven home by this concise family history and act of love.
Takeaway: Study of four generations of a family from the Konkan region of India.
Comparable Titles: Jung Chang’s Wild Swans, Firoozeh Dumas’s Funny in Farsi.
Production grades
Cover: B
Design and typography: A
Illustrations: A
Editing: A
Marketing copy: A
