Review: BEFORE WE VISIT THE GODDESS

My review of Before We Visit the Goddess (Simon & Schuster) by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni was published in Lone Star Literary Life!

From the review:

�What is more painful, the misplaced past or the runaway future?� 

It�s 1995 and Sabitri, in questionable health, has retired to her ancestral village in India. Receiving a desperate late-night phone call from her estranged daughter, Bela, in Houston, Texas, Sabitri begins a letter to her granddaughter, Tara, who has decided to drop out of college�but Sabitri dies before the letter is mailed. Fast forward to 1998: Tara has dropped out of college and is working in a thrift store in Houston, aimless and disconnected from her Indian heritage and a community that might offer her support, estranged from her mother and father, never knowing her grandmother. 

Before We Visit the Goddess, the seventeenth book by American Book Award winner Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, is about dislocation: from family, country, and history; and the inevitable conflict resulting from each successive generation�s refusal, or inability, to learn from the mistakes of the previous generation. These women have more in common than they know.

Please click here to read the entire review.