This was recommended on the great book blog, Read All Day, so I picked it up off of the library's new book shelf, continuing my strange interest in novels set in India. I liked it immediately, less so as it seemed to degrade in to a soap opera like novel, yet it's worth reading and everyone will like Korobi Roy, the granddaughter of the esteemed Roy family in Kolkata (Calcutta, the City of Dreadful Night). Korobi is brought up by her grandparents, her mother having died in childbirth. She has been sheltered most of her life, living with grandparents, protected from reality by a private school. She begins a metamorphosis, however, when she discovers a love letter from her mother to her father, meets and becomes engaged to the ravish Rajat, son of a wealthy gallery owner in Kolkata and New York. When her revered Grandfather dies, her Grandmother, freed from the shackles of her husband, blurts out that Korobi's father was an American and might still be alive, giving Korobi a mission, to find her father and herself before marrying Rejat. This, of course, is met with displeasure by her soon to be in laws and her Grandmother but she is not deterred. She makes contact with a Mr. Desai, in NYC, a private investigator, and flies to New York on her own, determined to find her father. This quest, of course, does not go well, with numerous dead ends, but in the end she finds out that her father is an African American and that he never married her mother, both taboos in traditional Bengal society. Not only is Korobi shocked by this, but she knows how her family and her fiance's family might react to this kind of heritage. She returns to Kolkata, frightened and uncertain, yet determined to be truthful, to her Grandmother and fiancee. Their reactions is typical, to accuse her of trying to hide her heritage and she returns home determined to resume her life at the university. But this is not a tragedy, more a comedy, as she reconciles with Rejat, her in laws, ends up marrying him in an understated ceremony and, we assume, they live happily ever after, as love wins out. As I mentioned earlier, I tired of the tribulations of Korobi, how the end, the finding of her father, was put off and contrasted with troubles in Rejat's family, as we were pulled back and forth between India and the States, with the young lovers miscommunicating, becoming friends with and tempted by the opposite sex, yet pulled towards each other. Maybe I am just becoming curmudgeonly but I was bored towards the end, ready to start my next book, a Harry Bosch novel from Michael Connelly.
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