Reviewed by Jocelyn Pearce for TeensReadToo.com

INVISIBLE LIVES is a sweet and sort of predictable read in that chick-lit way, but the Indian and paranormal twists make it good fun and add a unique element to the more predictable parts of the story.

Lakshmi Sen is a young Indian woman in Seattle with an odd ability to read people's emotions. She physically sees them (this is the supernatural part of the story but it is not addressed as supernatural--the story is not about explaining this ability), and this gives her a great advantage where she works in her mother's sari shop.

Lakshmi's life is going along fairly smoothly. She has a good job, and her family has found a good Indian doctor for her to marry. The excitement that a Bollywood star brings to the shop, however, disrupts her life more than one would think. Whenever the star's handsome chauffeur is around, Lakshmi's special abilities that make her so good at finding the perfect sari for anyone, disappear.

What's a girl to do?

Lakshmi is a powerful and memorable character, and her story is a fun, fast-paced read. The story is quite well-written, and Lakshmi's extra abilities are approached very interestingly, as just a part of who she is rather than the entire story. It's an excellent book, but it does lack a bit of a spark. I'd still pick up more by Anjali Banerjee, and recommend this novel. ( )

A Soft Change

I just finished reading Anjali Banerjee's Invisible Lives, which is a tale of a woman with the ability to see people's hidden desires and her own search for love and marriage while staying true to herself. It is so very different from anything I've read recently--different from anything on my bookcases since college. Centralized around Indian culture and characters but maintaining traditional Western plot arcs, I found reading it a bit like watching a Bollywood film. Everything familiar was exotic, sometimes confusing, and in many ways softer than an American book exploring the same themes.

In reading it, I've found a strange peace, a tranquility. Though my thoughts have been idly toying with dark fantasies and creepy scenes for a yet undecided book, I still enjoyed Invisible Lives. It was like it soothed my conscious and gave it a safe place to explore the scary thoughts from.

Banerjee's prose is beautiful, too. It reminds me of reading a short story, where imagery is tightly monitored under the constraints of strict word/page counts. Her descriptions were so image-invoking, so perfect, and what she left unsaid told the story as much as what she wrote, which is a unique gift in itself.

I might not have noticed her subtle ability to tell parts of the story with unsaid words had it not so recently, blatantly, been referenced in Sunshine (Robin McKinley), the book I finished just before this soft-spoken romantic comedy. As Sunshine (the main character) is in the middle of vampires and learning that she has a special ability to kill them using her knife, McKinley writes:

"Reading scary books is weirdly reassuring, most of the time: it means at least one other person--the author--has imagined things as awful as you have. What's bad is when the author comes up with stuff you hadn't thought of yet.

I'd thought it was bad when I was just reading stuff I hadn't thought of.

And even then I'd known that sometimes it's worse when the author leaves it to your imagination.

I stopped using my knife. I found I didn't have to. I found out I could do it with my hands."

And that's all McKinley says about how Sunshine kills the rest of the vampires in that scene. Brilliant. ( )

Predictable ending to this lovely romance novel, but I loved the psychic edge used to give us the smaller, sweet stories of the sari shop customers and employees. ( )

This was a really enjoyable read. I loved the humor in it. And who can't do with some escapism romance in our lives? ( )

This book was cute and is another addition into the virtually non-existent world of Indian chick lit. I enjoyed the book overall, I just found some parts of it odd. I felt that there wasn't much explanation either. For example, why did the Goddess Lakshmi have the main character hide her beauty? Was it because it drove away business or something else? I'm probably reading way too much into a novel that is supposed to be light and fluffy, but that's just me! ( )