Thursday, November 10, 2005

Maya Running

This is a book by Anjali Banerjee that I read for my YA book group meeting this month. It's a quick read (as many YA books tend to be), and it's pretty good. It's about an Indian girl who lives in Manitoba and feels somewhat like an outcast as a result of her ethnicity, and it's a cute story. Her cousin Pinky comes to visit from India and, naturally, all hell breaks loose.

It's not a bad story but I found it a little one dimensional. I never got much of a sense of her daily life, or the traditions of the culture that she was upset by, apart from the now-standard embarrassing ethnic food in the lunch room scene.

The mid-way point of the novel features Maya, the main character, being granted wishes by Ganesh, the Elephant Hindu God. While I don't have a problem with that sort of concept, it felt a little bit out of nowhere to me. Sure, that's how it felt to Maya too, but it seemed like a perfectly normal book was trucking along nicely and then all of a sudden we were into magic realism.

The first half of the book was fleshed out quite nicely, with a lot of detail, and then things sort of went downhill about half way through. Not much happened in the first half, but then too much happened in the second half, and as a result it was a very unbalanced book - felt almost like two halves of two different books. I didn't dislike it, but I liked Swimming in the Monsoon Sea much better, and the concepts were quite similar.

So: not bad, not great. But an immensely quick read.

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home