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Miss New India (2011)

by Bharati Mukherjee(Favorite Author)

2.92 of 5 Votes: 1

ISBN

0618646531 (ISBN13: 9780618646531)

languge

English

genre

Fiction

publisher

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

review 1: 2.5 starsI'm not sure how to rate this one, as I found the main character and her plotline to be the least pleasant part of an otherwise interesting and thought-provoking book. India itself is the real star here, proving itself to be complicated and complex, flawed and beautiful, traditional and yet craving more. Seeing it unfold was much more satisfying to read than the too-coincidental and often irritating story of Anjali Bose.
review 2: There is too much coincidence in this book - she happens to meet a rich American boy who will be a pivotal character in saving her later; her cab driver happens to run out of gas in front of a coffee shop where she meets a man who will save her multiple times as well (and who knows her landlady and admires her teacher/benefac... moretor); at the coffee shop random non-characters happen to decide she should meet this hot Bengali guy (who turns out to be a very minor, also poorly fleshed-out character, but who nonetheless reappears a couple times in the story); she happens to look just like one of her housemates (which turns out to be biiiig trouble!) and on an on. When I got to the point (spoiler alert) where she is arrested I had to put the book down for several weeks - too much ridiculousness kept happening to this girl. She fails as a customer service call center person because she's too empathetic, but for some reason people think she'd be a good call center debt collector.All of these things that happen, though, are more unconnected events, than a consistent forward movement of plot. None of them seem to change Anjali except one disastrous thing at the beginning, otherwise it's just a series of out-there vignettes. Basically it's less of a plot than the unfortunate things that happen to the main character over an 8 month-ish period. As other reviewers have noted, she also had no discernible personality. People think she has a "spark" but she's mostly selfish, naive (ignorant?), confused, and sometimes, briefly, illogically self-blaming. We're told she wants more than just marriage, but then all she does is fantasize about this sugar daddy or that. She's super-confidant/swaggering, she's super insecure - with nothing to ease the transition or show that it's depth of character rather than inconsistency. Sometimes we're told she's angry, even though we never see her behaving with anger or processing anger. People are drawn to her and go to great lengths for her for no apparent reason.I also got the sense this book wasn't edited at all. There were too many lines that just seemed wedged in that bore no relationship to what was going on, but which the author just seemed to think sounded good. Ex: Angali is out fishing with Rabi an Moni (both photographers, Moni really likes Photoshop). Moni speaks" "'You stare long enough into dancing water and you think you in there with the fish like you've sprouted gills.' Rabis ego was so vast, it encompassed the world. Anjali felt herself a part of it. 'Watch out for Moni,' said Rabi. He'll Photoshop a pair of nesting pterodactlys.' Its a Photoshop world, she thought. 'We've all been Photoshopped,' said Moni. 'I know I've been' She had no memories. Her memories were only starting now. Her life was starting now." WTF????I held out because I liked the idea of the book, and was hoping the end might redeem it. Instead it was a non-ending where things were wrapped up in a little bow through the epilogue. We don't get to see how the main character got where she did in in the epilogue, we're just told she did. Talk about a cop out. less

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