{"id":554,"date":"2018-12-31T12:47:53","date_gmt":"2018-12-31T12:47:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/?p=554"},"modified":"2018-12-31T12:47:53","modified_gmt":"2018-12-31T12:47:53","slug":"lone-star-book-reviewsby-michelle-newby-nbcccontributing-editor-55","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/?p=554","title":{"rendered":"Lone Star Book ReviewsBy Michelle Newby, NBCCContributing Editor"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/div>\n

<\/span><\/span><\/span>Michelle Newby<\/span> is contributing editor at Lone Star Literary Life, reviewer for Foreword Reviews, <\/span>freelance writer, member of the National Book Critics Circle, and blogger at www.TexasBookLover.com. Her reviews appear or are forthcoming in Pleiades Magazine, Rain Taxi, World Literature Today, South85 Journal, The Review Review, Concho River Review, Monkeybicycle, Mosaic Literary Magazine, Atticus Review, <\/span>and The Collagist.<\/span><\/p>\n

Lone Star Book Reviews
of Texas books appear weekly
at LoneStarLiterary.com<\/a><\/span><\/h1>\n
\n

<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n

<\/span><\/span>FICTION<\/p>\n

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni<\/span><\/p>\n

Before We Visit the Goddess<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

Simon & Schuster<\/p>\n

Hardcover, 978-1-4767-9200-2 (also available as an ebook, audiobook, and on Audible), 224 pgs., $25.00<\/p>\n

April 19, 2016<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat is more painful, <\/span>the misplaced past or the runaway future?\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s 1995 and Sabitri, in questionable health, has retired to her ancestral village in India. Receiving a desperate late-night phone call from her estranged daughter, Bela, in Houston, Texas, Sabitri begins a letter to her granddaughter, Tara, who has decided to drop out of college\u2014but Sabitri dies before the letter is mailed. Fast forward to 1998: Tara has dropped out of college and is working in a thrift store in Houston, aimless and disconnected from her Indian heritage and a community that might offer her support, estranged from her mother and father, never knowing her grandmother.<\/p>\n

Before We Visit the Goddess, <\/span><\/a><\/span>the seventeenth book by American Book Award winner Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni,<\/span> is about dislocation: from family, country, and history; and the inevitable conflict resulting from each successive generation\u2019s refusal, or inability, to learn from the mistakes of the previous generation. These women have more in common than they know.<\/p>\n

The plot is simple and would almost be a comedy of errors if the results weren\u2019t so frequently tragic. The narrative, told by multiple characters and varying points of view\u2014sometimes third person, other times first\u2014is challenging as the flow is constantly interrupted by time and space, jumping around between the past, beginning in 1963, and ending up in the future, 2020; and between India, California, and Texas. On the other hand, this technique neatly mirrors the feelings of dislocation experienced by the diverse, well-developed characters. All of the principals are complex human beings in their successes and failures, provided with rich backstories and motivations.<\/p>\n

Divakaruni\u2019s Houston is a joy in all of its multiples: racial, ethnic, cultural. She pokes a little fun at the \u201csuburban funhouse\u201d of street names in the surrounding bedroom communities: \u201cAustin Colony, Austin Glen, Austin Crossing.\u201d<\/p>\n

Divakaruni is adept at the just-right simile: the child Bela wakes from a fever in the hospital where \u201cher mother\u2019s face looms large over the bed, alarming as an out-of-orbit moon\u201d; and when a young man who has recently suffered a heartbreak is asked out by a new man his \u201cchest felt like it was too small to contain all the things knocking around inside it. Heart, lungs, excitement, a surge of blood like sorrow. The backwash of memories.\u201d<\/p>\n

With its embossed dust jacket, Before We Visit the Goddess<\/span> is a physically beautiful book in which Divakaruni writes passionately, although sometimes sentimentally, about loss, regret, and the importance of communication and forgiveness. Though the ending is rather abrupt, it is satisfying and hopeful. We fail each other, not necessarily from selfishness, but from obliviousness and with the best of intentions.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Michelle Newby is contributing editor at Lone Star Literary Life, reviewer for Foreword Reviews, freelance writer, member of the National Book Critics Circle, and blogger at www.TexasBookLover.com. Her reviews appear or are forthcoming in Pleiades Magazine, Rain Taxi, World Literature Today, South85 Journal, The Review Review, Concho River Review, Monkeybicycle, Mosaic Literary Magazine, Atticus Review, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-554","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/554","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=554"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/554\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=554"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=554"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=554"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}