The Girl in the Garden

March 7, 2011
Nair's accomplished debut is a familial drama spanning multiple decades. Rakhee Singh has spent years avoiding memories of the transformative summer when she turned 11, but her betrothal forces her to realize she needs to acknowledge her past before she can move forward. "Keeping secrets had become second nature, an inheritance passed down from mother to daughter like an heirloom." As a young child in Minnesota, Rakhee senses her mother's unhappiness, and this feeling intensifies after a batch of mysterious letters arrives from India. Her mother's moods become unpredictable, culminating in the decision to visit her family in rural Kerala with Rakhee, leaving her husband behind. In India, Rakhee longs to explore the jungle surrounding the family's home, but is warned about a superstition prohibiting children from entering it. Rakhee disobeys and what she discovers there is a tangled web of deceit that will haunt her for years. Nair creates a satisfying coming-of-age tale with smooth prose and a lustrous backdrop.

Anitha Gandhi has a lovely voice and the perfect accent for this story of family secrets uncovered during an American girl's summer visit with her mother's family in India. There's a fairy-tale quality to Rakhee's adventures when she disobeys her aunties and ventures at dawn into the jungle behind the family house. Nair's story is winning, an updated SECRET GARDEN. But in Gandhi's garden a hospital is always a "hospill" and "couldn't have" is always "coun'v," and her syllable-swallowing haste has nothing to do with narrative pace. Nor does she interpret sentences with great attention to sense. Surely clearer direction from the producers could have helped. What's here is unfair to the author, and perhaps to the narrator as well. B.G. (c) AudioFile 2011, Portland, Maine

November 1, 2011

Debut author Nair has written a powerfully compelling coming-of-age story in which ten-year-old Rakhee discovers the family skeletons during a summer in India with her mother and her mother's relatives. With a realistic yet easily understood Indian accent, actress Anitha Gandhi (Law & Order: Criminal Intent) conveys in a calm, quiet, evocative reading the confusion of a child in a strange country with different mores and expectations, living with an unstable parent. Released simultaneously with the print volume, this audiobook holds the listener's attention and will appeal to fans of family drama, Indian fiction, and Frances Hodgson Burnett's Secret Garden. The CD edition includes a bonus PDF of the Varma family tree and an author interview. ["The unexpected twists and dark secrets lurking make it difficult for readers to put this engrossing story down," read the review of the Grand Central hc, LJ 6/1/11.--Ed.]--Laurie Selwyn, formerly with Grayson Cty. Law Lib., Sherman, TX

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