Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni's One Amazing Thing
In the days before I had this blog, I read Divakaruni's novel Mistress of Spices, which was a perfectly enjoyable novel, but pretty much exactly the story you'd expect from a book called Mistress of Spices. So I wasn't in any big hurry to read this new novel by her, until good reviews started turning up in my Google Reader (I do think the NPR story mischaracterizes the story in a slightly Orientalist manner--one of the very first pages has a character reading Chaucer, and clearly the book is more of an homage to the Canterbury Tales as opposed to the Arabian Nights stories). Anyway, it's about nine people who get trapped in an earthquake, and one suggests they all tell a story from their lives to help pass the time and distract themselves while they wait for rescue, and all of the stories are surprisingly moving and interesting. A.
(A review copy was provided by the publisher.)
No comments:
Post a Comment