Half Gods

April 16, 2018
In Kumarasamy’s debut collection of linked stories, a boy disappears in the wake of a storm, an entomologist stages an act of political resistance after his son disappears, and a pair of brothers go to Lake George with a young Sikh boy who changes both of their lives in different ways. At the center of it all is a family whose patriarch, Muthu, escaped Sri Lanka during the civil war and settled in New Jersey with his only surviving daughter, Nalini, who would later birth two sons, Arjun and Karna. Each gets his or her turn as the focus of a story. Nalini, who straddles both her father’s war-torn Sri Lanka and her sons’ suburban New Jersey, is easily the collection’s strongest character, embodying the tension between the two. Though, as a young woman, she seems to get it all right—she escapes from New Jersey, finds a loving husband and a big house—the lingering trauma of her past leads her to implode her marriage, sending her back to her father’s side. Kumarasamy’s prose is gorgeous and assured, capable of rendering both major tragedy (war, the dissolution of a marriage, the loss of a child) and minor tragedy (a botched effort at matchmaking, a pitying Christmas invitation) with care and precision. Though the stories can sometimes blend together, the writing is strong throughout, resulting in a wonderful, auspicious debut.

May 1, 2018
A collection of stories about a family for whom the Sri Lankan civil war is a constant backdrop.The Sri Lankan civil war, a bitter fight between the country's majority Sinhalese and minority Tamils, lasted for decades; tens of thousands of people died. In Kumarasamy's first book, that war is always present. At the center of these stories is a family: Nalini, her father, and her two sons, Arjun and Karna. During the war, Nalini's mother and twin brothers were brutally murdered. She and her father manage to flee to New Jersey, but the war, and their grief, follows close behind. Each story takes a different vantage point: In one of them, Nalini is a child, making friends in their dinky apartment complex; in another, she's a grown woman with teenage sons. The stories vary between characters' points of view as well as location and time. The result is a kaleidoscopic vision of a family. While the book is moving and the writing elegant and clear, the collection begins to feel almost like a writing exercise, moving from third-person to first-person and back; when it finally comes to the rarely used second person ("You are thirty but can pass for someone seven years younger"), the effect isn't nearly as surprising as it might otherwise have been. It might be that Kumarasamy's control on the stories is too tight. One wonders what might happen if she were to loosen her grip.An otherwise moving collection feels overly prescribed.

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Starred review from May 1, 2018
Kumarasamy's brilliant collection of interlinked short stories is a masterful combination of strong, insightful storytelling and tangential political commentary. With changing narrators, she travels across time and place?contemporary New Jersey, a Sri Lankan tea plantation on the eve of independence from Britain in 1948, Sri Lanka's turbulent civil war during 2008-09, and Calcutta during Bangladeshi turmoil. The themes are as ambitious in scope as the sprawling canvas as Kumarasamy captures the sense of dislocation that comes with imminent adulthood, political change, immigrant uncertainties, and a marriage in flux. Identity?individual, within a family, and in a community as an immigrant or refugee?is a constant thread, and her deftness in ensuring that religious and sexual elements all feel integral to each story deserves much credit. Arjun and Karna, the half gods of the title; their mother, Nalini; and their grandfather provide the pegs that anchor this must-read collection. The changing narrative voices and the back-and-forth between past and present leave the reader with a deep understanding of the lives of the two boys who start out on a tea plantation in Nuwara Eliya all those many years ago.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)

February 1, 2018

This collection from Kumarasamy, who won multiple awards at the Helen Zell Writers' Program at the University of Michigan, ranges across religious lines and from Calcutta to New Delhi to New Jersey as it follows the lives of a beleaguered Sri Lankan family.

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