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! ( )

Lakshmi, working in her mother's shop, has a talent for being able to choose exactly the right sari for a customer at a given time. Her happy customers spread word of her talents and soon the shop attracts the rich and famous. Will Lakshmi be satisfied with keeping her customers happy or will she want more out of life? Nice Indian chicklit read. ( )