What Lies Between Us

December 15, 2015
This family tragedy begins in a prison cell, where the unnamed narrator wants to explain her (also unnamed) crime by telling her life story, from birth and childhood in Sri Lanka to adolescence and young adulthood in California. The narrator's father, a professor from an upper-class family, married her beautiful but poor mother in the early 1970s, when he was 29 and she only 17. The narrator, born a year later after a difficult delivery that left her mother unable to bear more children, feels the pressure of being the center of her parents' lives. In glorious detail she describes the lush beauty of her childhood home, the flavors of the food, the love she feels from cousins and schoolmates. But her nostalgic memories also contain fear, dread, and confusion. Her mother veers from doting to withdrawn to hostile. Her father mopes and drinks. And then there's Samson the gardener: is he a source of protection or threat? She's not completely sure, but she has dreams of dangerous sexuality. After an altercation shortly before the narrator's 14th birthday, her father drowns and Samson goes missing. The narrator and her mother leave Sri Lanka for California, where the immigrant teenager struggles to fit in but also shares moments of genuine joy and intimacy with her Americanized cousin Dharshi. Then there's the glorious spiraling love the narrator shares with Daniel, a white artist from West Virginia. The exuberance of the narrator's memories are undercut by repeated warnings that the ending will be unhappy and by overwrought teasers concerning the murkily described evils that have supposedly caused the narrator's own unspoken, unspeakable behavior. The melodramatic framing device only distracts from the crystalline precision with which Munaweera (Island of a Thousand Mirrors, 2014) renders the richness of the immigrant experience as well as her character's singular longings, fears, joys, and demons.

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May 1, 2016

Ganga's childhood is turned upside down by the unexpected death of her father. She and her mother must take advantage of her aunt's hospitality in America-a huge lifestyle change from her father's ancestral home in Sri Lanka. Ganga's relationship with her mother has always been tumultuous, and it doesn't improve when the girl becomes a typical 1980s American teenager. Once in college, Ganga finally finds love, acceptance, and a relationship, but the young couple's intimacy is tested by an unexpected pregnancy. Ganga isn't sure she can be a good mother-she has too many secrets and is terrified that the cycle of abuse will be repeated with her own daughter. The lush and sultry Sri Lankan setting provides a fitting atmosphere for the beginning of this dark and tense novel. From the outset, readers know that Ganga has done something horrible to her child, and the sense of foreboding grows throughout the narrative. While the latter part of the novel is written from Ganga's point of view as a new wife and mother, teens will still want to continue reading to find out what happened to the young child and what caused the violence.

Copyright 2016 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from February 15, 2016
Childhood in Sri Lanka is enchanting, filled with luscious flowers, juicy fruits, and other native beauties. For one girl, this magical time is also filled with the warmth and security of family and friends who enrich her beautiful riverside home, but behind the inviting facade lurks a dangerous darkness. When tragedy strikes, she and her mother flee to America, where she begins to rebuild her life. Away from the terrors that plagued her and the constricting traditions of her homeland, she pursues her education, becoming first a nurse, then a wife and mother. She is proud of her accomplishments and blissfully happy. But just when she feels she has everything, the demons of the past return to haunt her. Fighting these unrelenting forces, she watches everything she loves slip away, until she believes just one option remains, one that only she will ever truly understand. Munaweera's style is richly descriptive and deeply personal as she probes the link between childhood trauma and adult psychosis. Writing with the same tantalizing prose that captured readers in her debut novel (Island of a Thousand Mirrors, 2014), Munaweera explores the relationship of mothers and daughters, tradition, honor, and sacrifice, with beautiful and devastating results.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)

September 15, 2015

Chronicling civil war in her native Sri Lanka, Munaweera's debut, Island of a Thousand Mirrors, was a Commonwealth Book Prize winner and got strong reviews in America. Here, a girl from Sri Lanka's beautiful hill country escapes terror by immigrating with her mother to America yet can't shake off the past and is eventually driven to commit a terrible crime.

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.