Well-Behaved Indian Women

May 25, 2020
Dave’s ambitious but uneven debut follows three generations of Indian and Indian-American women as they navigate life. In 2018, Simran Mehta, 26, is engaged to her high school sweetheart, and their lives seem fast-tracked to success; he’s in medical school at NYU, she’s in grad school at Columbia for psychology, and they couldn’t be happier. After a chance encounter with a handsome newspaper columnist Simran admires, unwanted emotions surge, not least her latent ambition to become a journalist. As Simran tracks an increasingly rocky road to self-discovery, she finds little comfort from her mother, Nandini, who is wrestling with a professional crisis of her own after years of taking a back seat to her husband’s career. Simran’s visit with her grandmother in India leads her to learn that Nandini, too, had struggled with the social pressures of her community, which gives Simran the courage to buck expectations. The stilted writing style—particularly the exposition-laden, unnatural dialogue—and near complete lack of sexual or romantic tension in the love story are big hurdles, as is a plot that too often feels like it’s stuck in neutral. Other novels have more effectively—and enjoyably—addressed the tensions between immigrant mothers and daughters.

Starred review from June 1, 2020
Three generations of Indian women living in India, New Jersey, and Manhattan try in vain to do what is expected of them and all fail in the same year by following their dreams instead. Simran is finishing her master's degree in psychology and planning her wedding to Kunal, an altruistic medical student, when she meets someone who changes the way she sees herself. Nandini is anticipating her empty nest with a sense of dissatisfaction with her distant husband and her job in a family practice clinic where the bottom line is everything, when a former colleague gets in touch about an amazing opportunity. Mimi is enjoying a peaceful widowhood in her village in India, visiting the local school to teach girls around the edges of what the curriculum offers, when parental complaints bring her to the attention of the superintendent. A compelling and complicated family story filled with secrets, assumptions, and growth through communication, Dave's debut renders these women's lives realistically, with stumbles and corrections as they go along. This is a good fit for readers who like layered stories of women's lives, complex social structures, and families finding balance between tradition and progressiveness.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)