Gold Diggers

December 1, 2020

Flouting expectations, second-generation Indian American teenager Neil Narayan prefers hanging out to striving mightily for success. Soon he's hanging out with Anita Dayal, helping her use stolen jewelry to create an alchemical potion drawing on the ambitions of the jewelry's original owner. Iowa Writers' Workshop grad Sathian lays waste to American stereotypes in a magic realist-touched debut.

Copyright 2020 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

February 1, 2021
High-school student Neeraj "Neil" Narayan has a problem: Among a sea of high-achieving Indian American kids in Hammond Creek, Georgia, including his sister, who may be headed to Duke, he is average at best. As Neeraj flails under the pressure of his family's ambitions, he chances upon a way out. Neeraj's neighbor, Anjali Dayal, and her daughter, Anita, are into alchemy. The premise: You can steal gifted Indian Americans' potential by consuming their gold jewelry, quite literally. Out of this nugget of magical realism, Sathian spins pure magic. As Neeraj juices up on gold, his life careens out of control until a stunning tragedy forces him to pick up the pieces and move on. Filled with pathos, humor, slices of American history, and an adrenaline-pumping heist, Sathian's spectacular debut also highlights the steep costs of the all-American dream. Neeraj reflects, "We had not grown up imbibing stories that implicitly conveyed answers to the basic questions of being: What did it feel like to fall in love in America, to take oneself for granted, in America? Starved as we were for clues about how to live, we would grip like mad on to anything that lent a possible way of being." Pure gold.

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February 1, 2021

Gr 9 Up-Neil is first-generation Indian American: His father emigrated from India to attend university, and his mother left India to marry his father. His parents settled in suburban Atlanta in a small community of Indian immigrants all striving to ensure that their kids become successful. The pressure to meet expectations is relentless and by high school, Neil is overwhelmed and underperforming. But his best friend and next-door neighbor Anita seems to have switched up gears dramatically. Neil discovers that Anita and her mother are making an alchemical drink derived from ancient Indian lore about the power of gold, which infuses Anita with extra drive and purpose. Neil wants in. But to make this elixir, they have to steal, and perhaps not just gold. It's not long before something dreadful happens and Neil and Anita must come to grips with their part in the tragedy, take responsibility, and make amends. This is an intense and riveting immigrant coming-of-age story, alternately funny and serious, mashed up with magical realism that makes a moving, heartfelt statement of how to become you, no matter who you are, where you are from, or where you are now. VERDICT Perfect for teens who enjoy deep reads like Adib Khorram's Darius the Great Is Not Okay and Samira Ahmed's Love, Hate & Other Filters.-Gretchen Crowley, formerly at Alexandria City P.L., VA

Copyright 2021 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

February 1, 2021
Young strivers in an Indian American enclave are both boosted and undone by a gold-infused elixir. Sathian's debut, a refreshing tweak of the assimilation novel, is narrated by Neil, aka Neeraj, who's surrounded by high-achieving desis while growing up outside Atlanta. In high school, Neil is talented at debate, if only half interested in it; his sister, Prachi, is fixated on winning the local Miss Teen India pageant. His neighbor and friend, Anita, seems the perfect mix of beauty and brains, but her parents are separated, subjecting them to the whispered judgments of the community. The family might be outcasts, except that Anita's mother, Anjali, has mastered the art of brewing a gold-spiked drink that supposedly helps those who consume it attain their ambitions. Anjali's sideline is a whispered secret, and because the gold must possess something of the personality of more successful people to work, much pilfering of jewelry boxes is afoot. Just as Sathian artfully and convincingly conjures a world in which such a drink exists, she sensitively exposes how its powers backfire. A tragedy that ensues from the pursuit of the "lemonade" slingshots the novel into its second half, as both Neil and Anita are in their 20s, living in the Bay Area, and struggling with disappointments: Anita is fresh off a breakup and has just left her job at a venture capital firm, and Neil can't make headway on his history dissertation on the Gilded Age, sidetracked by a story about an Indian man during the gold rush. Sathian's shifts into romance- and heist-novel tropes in the late going aren't always graceful, but she does a fine job of showing how the ladder-climbing, Ivy League-or-bust fixations of Neil and Anita's community lead to hollow grown-up behavior. (Especially when blended with all-American go-getter-ism; Neil acquires robust Adderall and coke habits.) Sathian has a knack for page-turner prose, but the story has plenty of heft. A winningly revamped King Midas tale.

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