Book 326: Polite Society

 

"As Dimple waited for Fahim, she doubted Ania's wisdom for the first time. There was no convincing reason why Fahim would be attracted to a woman like her, obviously provincial, still at times cloddish, when he had the pick of those sophisticated gazelles at media parties. Ania had kept insisting that she could see the signs. but Dimple was worried about the dangers of being wrong. It had taken her months of discipline and training to calm the anxieties that assailed her—worries about her position as some kind of interloper—and now her equilibrium was again wrecked. Ania was too fearless and her friendship too effortless, spilling from her without consequence, leaving a trail of easy generosity and advice. For Dimple that same friendship offered elation and play, but also apprehension and uncertainty, a fear that it would all collapse and crumble to dust."

Dates read: July 9-12, 2019

Rating: 7/10

A few years before I started this blog, I started making a concerted effort to read the much-bemoaned classics. I wasn't an English major (Psychology for me!), so apart from the standard high school mandatories like Gatsby and Mockingbird, I had read actually quite few of them. And what a surprise it was! While some of them deserve their boring reputations, many others have survived the test of time because they're wonderful reading experiences. Turns out I love Jane Austen! Who knew?

When she wrote Emma, Austen famously described her as a heroine that she didn't think people would really like. A smart, pretty, rich girl isn't exactly the most sympathetic of heroines. Clueless proved that Emma could hold up well to adaptation, so when I read that Mahesh Rao had decided to transplant the book to modern-day India in Polite Society, I was curious. Instead of Emma Woodhouse, we have Ania Khurana, beloved daughter of wealthy businessman Dileep. Ania is bored with her socialite life in the most elite circles of Delhi, and when she successfully sets up her spinster aunt Renu, she decides her next project will be her new friend Dimple, who works in PR. Dimple grew up in the country, and though she met a nice guy, Ankit, when she first moved to the city, finds it hard to resist when Ania tries to steer her towards up-and-coming reporter Fahim.

While many aspects of the original are here, Rao puts his own, darker spin on some of the side characters: both the Frank Churchill and Jane Fairfax types have very different storylines than Austen gave them, and Dileep is drawn dangerously into the thrall of a faith healer type called Mr. Nayak. The broad strokes of the story play out more or less as expected, though: Fahim does not fall for Dimple and marries impulsively shortly thereafter, Ania grows closer to her longtime family friend Dev (standing in for Mr. Knightly) even as she develops a flirtation with the Frank substitute, Dimple and Ankit come back to each other eventually. But while Austen wraps things up neatly and happily, it's much more unsettled at the end of Polite Society.

Taking a beloved story and adapting it is a tricky thing to do...too close to the original, and it barely seems worth the effort, but too far away and you risk enraging fans. I think Rao struck a good balance, adding plot twists that gave the story new complexity. I especially liked the addition of perspectives besides that of Ania, which had the effect of giving Dimple, Dileep, and even Fahim so much more richness and interest. I appreciated the generally edgier tone and the way it undercut a story that has a lot of romantic wish fulfillment and froth built into it. The story the book tells is compelling, and I think would work even without having read Emma (though the understanding that the heroine is supposed to be kind of annoying is definitely helpful to come in with).

While I enjoyed a lot of what this book did, it was not entirely successful. Rao's prose lacks the wit and verve that really mark Austen as a master of her craft, and is less charming as a result of the inevitable comparison. And while many of the side stories were a welcome addition, it felt like there were too many to give them all time to really develop. The generally lightweight tone of the book (even in the heavier way Rao rendered it) would be compromised by the addition of too many extra pages, but I think another 50 or so would have given it all a little more room to breathe. Overall, though, I found this book very good and would recommend it both to those who already love Emma and those who haven't experienced it yet!

One year ago, I was reading: The Death of Vivek Oji

Two years ago, I was reading: A Perfect Explanation

Three years ago, I was reading: The Coming Plague

Four years ago, I was reading: Love Medicine

Five years ago, I was reading: The Man Without A Face

Six years ago, I was reading: Zodiac

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Book 326: Polite Society

Book 317: Midnight's Children

"Does one error invalidate the entire fabric? Am I so far gone, in my desperate need for meaning, that I'm prepared to distort everything—to re-write the whole history of my times purely in order to place myself in a central role? Today, in my confusion, I can't judge. I'll have to leave it to others. For me, there can be no going back; I must finish what I've started, even if, inevitably, what I finish turns out not to be what I began..."

Dates read: May 20-29, 2019

Rating: 8/10

Lists/awards: Booker Prize, Time's All-Time 100 Novels

I have many issues with how history is taught in public schools, but one of the biggest is how little time gets spent on the Eastern hemisphere. Lots of America, obviously, but outside of learning about the Fertile Crescent and Ancient Egypt again and again and again, we don't get into much besides Europe. I have to imagine that most countries focus heavily on themselves and their immediate neighbors when they study the past, but some of the oldest, richest civilizations in the world are on the other side of the globe and we barely study them! I wish it were otherwise, but sadly I am not in charge of things.

The more books I read set in India, the more I wish I had a firm grasp of modern Indian history. Indian independence, and the partition that followed, continue to resonate not just in literature, but on a global political scale. Salman Rushdie explores these momentous events through his Booker Prize-winning epic, Midnight's Children. The novel tells the story of Saleem Sinai, born at the moment India begins post-colonial self-rule, and tracks his life as it, and his country, develop. But its more ambitious even than that: it begins with his grandparents and their youth, then tells the story of his own parents, and only then turns its full attention to its own protagonist.

Saleem is born to Ahmed and Amina Sinai, well-off Muslims living in Bombay, at exactly midnight on the day the British officially surrender the country, at the same moment as another child, a Hindu boy called Shiva. It turns out there are 1,001 children born in that first hour of India's modern life, and each of them have a gift, a magical power...and the closer to midnight, the stronger that power is. Saleem doesn't discover his until he is nine, when he begins to hear voices in his head: those of the other "children of midnight", who can speak to not only him but each other as he psychically hosts them. He eventually loses this power, but develops the ability to smell the feelings of other people. As he continues to grow, his fate (along with those of his parents and his little sister Jamila, called "The Brass Monkey" as a child for her hair color) is tied to that of his homeland.

There's much, much more than that, of course. Even attempting a brief outline of the twists and turns of Rushdie's tremendously complicated plot (and enormous cast of characters) would take several paragraphs. It's truly a stunningly ambitious novel, and what's even more stunning is that it mostly pulls it off. Characters come and go organically, storylines are fully developed and have solid payoffs. Rushdie writes the story to be narrated by Saleem himself to a female companion from roughly the modern day (when the book was written), and superbly uses that technique to frame it and give it momentum. It's deep, and rich, and beautifully written and constructed.

While it is undisputedly a masterwork, though, I don't know that I actually loved it as much as I respect it. Part of that is that I simply don't have enough context for it. Even as an educated person, my understanding of modern Indian history is thin and this book is the kind that requires a higher level of knowledge to really comprehend everything that it's doing. And while Rushdie mostly maintains the plot's progression nimbly despite the text's density, by the end there have been just so many characters and the scope is so vast that I found myself a little burned out and ready for it to end. It is not a book that should be read in snippets here and there, it demands and requires full and sustained bouts of attention. If you're ready to read a modern classic that's going to need a lot from you as a reader and reward the work you put into it, I'd highly recommend it. If you're looking for something on the easier side, though, leave this one until you're really ready to sink your teeth into something. 

One year ago, I was reading: The Satanic Verses

Two years ago, I was reading: Native Speaker

Three years ago, I was reading: The Winter of the Witch

Four years ago, I was reading: Ghost Wars

Five years ago, I was reading: American Heiress

Six years ago, I was reading: The Serpent King

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Book 317: Midnight's Children

Book 311: The Lowland

"The future haunted but kept her alive; it remained her sustenance and also her predator. Each year began with an unmarked diary. A version of a clock, printed and bound. She never recorded her impressions in them. Instead she used them to write rough drafts of compositions, or work out sums. Even when she was a child, each page of a diary she had yet to turn, containing events yet to be experienced, filled her with anxiety instead of promise. Like walking up a staircase in darkness. What proof was there that another December would come?"

Dates read: April 20-26, 2019

Rating: 8/10

I tend to believe Tolstoy when it comes to that stuff about unhappy families. Except that I think that there are so few truly happy families that we can safely exclude them from the data set. Pretty much every family has its own special kind of unhappiness. All of our parents screwed us up in their own ways. And their parents screwed them up, and we'll screw our own children up. The only thing to be done is to do your best to keep the damage minimal.

In Jhumpa Lahari's The Lowland, brothers Subhash and Udayan are so close that they're often confused for twins despite being a few years apart. They have a more or less happy childhood, building radios and playing in the marshy lowlands near their family's Calcutta home. As they start to grow up, they start to grow apart. Udayan becomes political, part of the Naxalite movement being repressed by the authorities. Subhash, on the other hand, turns towards school, eventually leaving India to study marine biology in Rhode Island. Separated by thousands of miles, the brothers do still write letters to each other, and Subhash is surprised to find out in one of them that his brother has gotten married. In defiance of expectations for his parents to chose a bride, Udayan has married a college student, Gauri, for love. Not too long afterwards, though, Udayan is killed.

When Subhash returns home for his brother's funeral, he finds an untenable situation: Gauri is pregnant, and his parents are planning to take the child to raise and kick her out after the birth. There's only one way out that he can see: he'll marry her, bring her back to the United States, and they'll raise the child as a family. With nowhere else to go, Gauri agrees. But this doesn't mean that everything's suddenly okay. Gauri gives birth to a daughter, Bela, and Subhash devotes himself to being a father. Gauri, though, is still traumatized by the death of her husband and the second marriage she had no real choice but to go through with. As Bela grows up, the family's tensions stretch to the breaking point.
 
This book is epic in scope, tracking Subhash through nearly his entire life and other characters, like Gauri and Bela, through much of theirs. Lahiri does her usual beautiful character work here...Udayan doesn't get a lot of narrative time until a flashback near the end, which leaves him feeling slightly unrealized, but the rest are developed in a way that feels achingly real. Gauri makes a decision that leaves her probably the least sympathetic of them, but the way Lahiri builds up to it, and what happens after, make it understandable. I also appreciated Bela's arc, the way that it seemed like she would grow up to become one sort of person because of the environment she was raised in, and then other events leading her to become a very different sort of person instead. All three of the major players were fascinating and I wanted to spend more time with them.

This is definitely one for people who prefer character over plot. Little actually "happens" besides a family coming together and coming apart. There's a more dramatic bit at the end, the part that goes back to the events leading up to Udayan's death, but I almost wished it hadn't been there or it had been told in its proper place in the chronology. I tend to think that Lahiri's writing is elegant almost to the point of being restrained, and having this part at the end feels out-of-character. That emotional remove, though, is what kept me from enjoying this novel more. It's a sophisticated work, but it deals with big emotions, and it felt like Lahiri was more devoted to keeping that style over letting the book really breathe, letting those feelings really build and explode. As it was, I admired it but didn't really connect with it. Still, it's a very well-written novel and one that I would definitely recommend to others.

One year ago, I was reading: Let's Explore Diabetes With Owls

Two years ago, I was reading: After The Party

Three years ago, I was reading: The Possibilities

Four years ago, I was reading: In The Woods

Five years ago, I was reading: The Girls

Six years ago, I was reading: Oriental Mythology

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Book 311: The Lowland

Book 281: Interpreter of Maladies

"She was like that, excited and delighted by little things, crossing her fingers before any remotely unpredictable event, like tasting a new flavor of ice cream, or dropping a letter in a mailbox. It was a quality he did not understand. It made him feel stupid, as if the world contained hidden wonders he could not anticipate, or see. He looked at her face, which, it occurred to him, had not grown out of its girlhood, the eyes untroubled, the pleasing features unfirm, as if they still had to settle into some sort of permanent expression."

Dates read: December 4-7, 20187

Rating: 7/10

Lists/Awards: Pulitzer Prize

When you actually think about it, the United States is an enormous country. If you travel the distance equivalent of a few states in Europe, you're in an entirely different nation, with its own language and culture and customs. So it's no surprise that moving to a new region can feel, in a small way, like immigrating. When I moved from the Midwest to the Deep South for law school, I felt different from many of my classmates. We all spoke the same language and ostensibly had the same national norms, but life there was not like the life I'd known (and before you assume, I am not saying that to denigrate the South...people there were mostly lovely and there are few things that bother me more than people making cheap jokes at the expense of Southerners). And then moving again from the Midwest to the Mountain West, it was the same thing. I've been a Nevadan for nearly a decade now, but there are still little things that happen every so often that remind me that I'm not really from here.

Themes of immigration, of the struggle to understand a new culture, permeate Jhumpa Lahiri's Pulitzer Prize-winning collection of short stories, Interpreter of Maladies. It's not necessarily the central point of every story, though...while all of them do feature Indian people, there are two that are set in India among Indians, and a few of them have white people as main characters. The stories cover a variety of situations, from a young couple struggling to reconnect after a tragedy to second-generation Indians traveling to the country of their parents' birth. Loneliness and disconnection are everywhere, and while many of the stories are more-or-less sad, there are also moments of levity and humor and on the whole this is surprisingly not a bummer collection to read.

I struggle so hard with conveying my thoughts on short stories, y'all, unless they're of the "interlinked" variety. For my money, this is a strong but (as almost always) uneven collection of work. My favorite stories were the opener ("A Temporary Matter") and the closer ("The Third and Final Continent"). That first one, about a couple reconnecting during a utility blackout, was a total incredible gut-punch and had me psyched for more of the same. And while there are high moments (like "This Blessed House", about a couple who keep finding tacky Christian decor in their new home and the tension between the husband and wife about what to do with it, which I found incredibly funny, and the not-at-all-funny-but-heartwrenching "Mrs. Sen's", about a preteen being babysat by a desperately lonely young Indian housewife), nothing comes close again to the impact of the first story until the last one, which relates the tale of a young Indian man who has just moved to the US and his very elderly white landlady.

All of the stories are very technically accomplished...they're well written, the characters are vivid, the prose is insightful. As someone with no gift at all for creative writing, I admire short stories almost more than I do novels. To tell a whole story that emotionally resonates in a limited page count is something fiendishly difficult, and Lahiri does it beautifully. While some of the stories are more closely related than others (there's no crossover in any of them), they all feel like they belong, nothing feels shoehorned in. Even some of the weaker stories, like "Sexy", have moments that I find indelible and remain with me even after reading several more books since I finished this one. If you like short stories, I'd highly recommend this. If you like Lahiri's work generally, I'd also recommend it. There's a reason this one won the Pulitzer, y'all: it's very good.

One year ago, I was reading: Foundation

Two years ago, I was reading: The Lowland

Three years ago, I was reading: The Kingmaker's Daughter

Four years ago, I was reading: The Leavers

Five years ago, I was reading: Dune

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Book 281: Interpreter of Maladies

Book 252: Shantaram

 

 "Personality and personal identity are in some ways like co-ordinates on the street map drawn by our intersecting relationships. We know who we are and we define what we are by references to the people we love and our reasons for loving them." 

Dates read: July 27- August 6, 2018

Rating: 5/10

If you had asked me where I'd be at 35 at virtually any point in my life, I 100% would not have said living in Reno, Nevada and working as a lobbyist. When I was in high school, I would have said probably in a major city practicing law, preparing for a career as a judge. In college, I would have waffled about maybe becoming a psychologist or academic, but probably still would have come down on the side of being a lawyer-looking-towards-the-judiciary. I wanted to be a prosecutor and then move onto the bench pretty much until the bottom fell out of the economy when I was in law school. With shrinking firm openings, even the kinds of public-sector jobs I'd had my eye on got super competitive, and for the first time I had to shift my dreams. That shift continued all the way until I got to where I am, and while it's worked out pretty damn well, it's nowhere near where I thought I'd be.

Of course, this is a pretty fortunate variant of the curveballs life can throw. The man who calls himself Lindsay "Lin" Ford (this is an alias, but we never get his real name) in Gregory David Roberts' Shantaram had a real switch-up. At one point, he was a typical suburban husband and father in Australia. Then he got into heroin, and then bank robbery, and then there was divorce and custody loss and prison. Facing a decades-long sentence in a high-security prison, he manages to escape and goes on the run, landing almost by chance in Mumbai with his forged passport and a chance decision to trust a street guide with a big smile changes his life all over again.

Lin's adventures in India are truly epic, from six months in his street-guide-turned-friend Prabakar's rural village, to living and working as a medic in one of the city's enormous slums, to Lin's passionate love for Karla, a beautiful and mysterious Swiss ex-pat, back to prison (in India this time), then into organized crime and even to Afghanistan to fight with the mujahideen. Along the way there's a shadowy, malevolent madam, a traintop marriage proposal, and Bollywood movies, among other things. It's sprawling, with countless side characters who appear and re-appear throughout. Lin's ability to proceed with cautious optimism keeps him generally lucky in both friendship and opportunity, but even that can't keep him safe from tragedy.

The book is based heavily on Roberts' own experiences...like his protagonist, he was an Australian addict-turned-robber who escaped from prison and lived for several years in India. While some characters are, in fact, entirely created, several (including Prabakar and his family) are actual people who Roberts did know in India but whose stories he may have rendered somewhat less than faithfully. It walks a fine line between obvious invention/fantasy (the scene in which Lin and Karla finally sleep together has them running into each other's arms while a thunderstorm rages around them and I literally laughed at how ridiculous it was though it was not at all meant to be funny) and things it seems like we're meant to believe even though they are clearly ludicrous (like the idea that Lin has apparently has an extraordinary ability to know instantly if someone is a decent person and is almost immediately accepted and tightly bonded into every community he finds himself in).

If you're looking for a plot-driven adventure story and have a high tolerance for flowery language, this will likely be something you really enjoy! It can honestly be hard to focus on how silly some of the events in the book are because he generally keeps things moving quickly enough that you don't linger on them before Roberts takes you in a new direction. I'm not kidding about the prose style, though...I'm generally fairly tolerant and sometimes even enjoy work that tends towards the overwritten, but only about 100 pages into the nearly 950 of this book I was already rolling my eyes and it didn't get better from there. There's a very good 500-600 page book in here, but it would have taken some serious editing down of the often-trite philosophical patter Roberts constantly inserts, and honestly more development of Lin as a character. He's our protagonist and we spend all our time with him, but we actually know vanishingly little of his life before he was imprisoned in his home country. We get full backstories for several less important characters, which made it extra frustrating for Lin to be so unrooted. As I think is probably obvious by now, I didn't especially like this book, finding it only mediocre-to-average in quality and completely unworthy of its enormous length. But honestly I think if I had read it in my early-to-mid-20s, when my tolerance for "poignant" pronouncements about life was higher, I'd have liked it more. As is, though, I can't recommend it.

One year ago, I was reading: Soon The Light Will Be Perfect

Two years ago, I was reading: Ready Player One

Three years ago, I was reading: The Bonfire of the Vanities

Four years ago, I was reading: A History of the World in 6 Glasses

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Book 252: Shantaram

Book 75: The White Tiger

 "If I were making a country, I’d get the sewage pipes first, then the democracy, then I’d go about giving pamphlets and statues of Gandhi to other people, but what do I know? I’m just a murderer!"

Read: August 1-3, 2016

Rating: 8/10

Lists/Awards: 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die (2012), Man Booker Prize

Here's a weird thing: I am actively pro-spoiler. Which you've probably noticed reading this blog...I try not to be gratuitous, but I will spoil things if it's necessary to talk about what I want to talk about regarding a book. I maintain that if your work (and I'm including movies and TV here) doesn't hang together if you know the Big Plot Twist, it's because it's not very good in the first place: the characterization, the quality of the writing, the dialogue, the pacing...if those aren't there, you don't have a well-told story, you just have a plot twist. Discovering the why is always more compelling for me than discovering the what.

Which is why I have a soft spot for books, like Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger, that tell you their big plot twist right up front. We know at the end of the first chapter that our narrator Balram, a former servant turned entrepreneur in India, killed his former master. What unfolds over the rest of the book is the story of why. It's the story of India in the modern day, a place of desperate poverty but also extravagant wealth, where ancient temples are just as much a part of life as smartphones. Balram is born into poverty in a rural area, and even though he seems destined to become a laborer, he resists the forces (including his family) that try to keep him in the underclass as long as he can. He finds himself a position as a driver for an upper-class landowner, and eventually moves with one of the landowner's sons to New Delhi to be his driver there.

New Delhi fundamentally changes both that son, Ashok, and Balram. Ashok has been educated in America, and treats his servants more or less like people. As he gets more and more sucked into the mire of his family's business (they're in the coal industry, and Ashok does a lot of running around with briefcases full of money to drop off with various politicians and officials), he becomes harder and harsher. When Balram is nearly forced to take the fall for a bad accident caused by Ashok's wife's drunk driving, Balram realizes that even as far as he's come from his roots, he's still not really safe. As long as he's poor and a servant, he'll always be expendable. But in order to get out of his situation, he needs money, and the money he has the easiest access to? Those briefcases that he's driving Ashok around with.

It's a dark satire, and after reading a lot of Serious Literature, I appreciated its wit and liveliness even more than I otherwise might have. But I would have enjoyed it no matter what. It's an epistolary novel (Balram writes to the prime minister of China, who is visiting India at the time, to explain India's entrepreneurial spirit), which allows it to skip around in time a little for maximum impact...we know that he's committed murder and gone on to start his own business, but how (and why) did he do it? How did he get away with it? What exactly does he do now?  The organic tension propels the book forward without being too mysterious. Balram is an indelible character, and I really appreciated the way that Adiga developed Ashok as well, portraying his moral decay even though we only see him through Balram's eyes. It's a quick read that manages to be thought-provoking while still being entertaining.

 Tell me, blog friends...how do you feel about spoilers?

One year ago, I was reading: Enchanted Islands

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Book 75: The White Tiger

Book 23: The Twentieth Wife

"These last two months had been slow and uncomfortable. They were all waiting for something. Waiting for Akbar's death. Waiting to see who would win the throne. Waiting- yet not wanting the Emperor to die, for either possibility seemed frightening."

Dates read: February 22-25, 2016

Rating: 4/10

Sometimes I wonder how much the liking of a book is tied to the time when you first read it. I wonder if I would still love some of the novels I first read in high school as much as I do if I'd been older and had a more developed critical eye than I did then. I started reading the Twilight series in the wake of a bad breakup, and I remain fond of the series (especially the breakup arc in New Moon) despite knowing full well that they're not high-quality literature. It would stand to reason, I think, that some books I've read right after something wonderful seem particularly lesser-than in comparison, and sometimes books that followed a dull and plodding one seem even better than they might actually be.

So I wondered if The Twentieth Wife following the double punch of two brilliant novels in a row might have been contributing to my disappointment with it. Was I being entirely fair to the novel on its own merits? If I'd read it, say, after one of the Masks of God books would I have liked it more? Ultimately, I feel like the answer is that no, I'm not being harsh because it doesn't measure up to the two amazing books I just read, it's honestly not very good.

To start on a positive note, it did introduce me to an era of world history I know precious little about: the Mughal Empire of India. I'd only really known two things about it previously: the rulers of the Mughal Empire were Muslim, and that the Taj Mahal was built as a memorial for a Mughal empress, Mumtaz Mahal. That's pretty much it. So the details that this novel provided about the empire and its courtly life were new, interesting information, and I particularly enjoyed the way each chapter opened with a quote from a historical source about the characters and events to be presented.

What didn't quite work, though, was most of the rest of it. The writing quality isn't particularly high...it was difficult to find a highlight quote because there were few bright spots. That's not to say it's especially poorly-written either, because it isn't...it's just mediocre. The novel tells the story of Mehrunissa, the daughter of a court official under the rule of Emperor Akbar. Although she is married to a soldier as a young woman, she and Akbar's heir apparent, Prince Salim, fall in love and eventually marry after her first husband's death. He becomes the the Emperor Jahangir, and she becomes his twentieth but most important wife, Nur Jahan, one of the most powerful women in the history of the Muslim world. She must be quite the interesting woman, eh?

Not really, as author Indu Sundaresan paints her. According to Sundaresan, when an eight year-old Mehrunissa catches a glimpse of Salim's first wedding at court, she decides right then and there that she will one day marry Salim. For no reason made particularly apparent, she attracts the interest of Akbar's most powerful wife, Ruqayya, as a companion, and spends her time at the palace thinking about how to attract Salim's attention so she can one day become an empress herself. Indeed, she spends her time at home thinking about the exact same thing. Even after she is married to another man, she keeps dreaming of a future with Salim. Mehrunissa is given no other real characterization besides "beautiful, educated woman completely obsessed with Salim". There's no depth or interest to her character. She has no close friends. Her first husband is presented as a one-dimensional brute who does not appreciate her or treat her very well. When the narrative shifts, as it does at times, to present Salim's story, he's presented as a weak-minded but ambitious man, easily manipulated, who is just as obsessed with Mehrunissa at first sight as she is with him. Neither of these people is given much of an inner life, nor are they at all compelling.

Which is disappointing, because from the Wikipedia-ing I was inspired to do, she led a very interesting life and a book about her should be fascinating. But a complete lack of character development and clunky writing have doomed this one to the donate pile.

Tell me, blog friends...what's one area of world history that you wish you would have learned more about in school?

Note: Review cross-posted at Cannonball Read

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Book 23: The Twentieth Wife