A special thank you to Edelweiss and Harper for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

 

Thrity Umrigar is a beautiful writer who capitalizes on human emotion in her latest novel about two families that couldn't be more different.  

 

During a terrible heatwave in 1991, ten-year-old Anton has been locked in his mother's apartment in the projects.  After being by himself for seven days without any air-conditioning, or fan, with the windows nailed shut, and no electricity, Anton breaks a window and climbs out.  He is bleeding from a wound in his leg when the police find him.  All-the-while, his mother, Juanita is discovered unconscious and half-naked in a crack house less than three blocks away.  When she comes to, she immediately asks for her "baby boy" insisting she only left for a quick hit, but that her drug dealer kept her high while repeatedly raping her.  Anton is placed with child services when his mother is sent to jail.  

 

David Coleman is the son of a US senator and a white Harvard-educated judge.  After the death of his only high-school-aged son, Coleman is desperate for a home with a child again.  David and his wife, Delores, foster Anton and quickly grow attached to the bright boy.  Despite Anton's mother's existence, Coleman uses his power, connections, and white privilege to keep his foster son.  

 

Anton follows in his adoptive father's footsteps and seems to have a knack for politics that is complimented by his charm.  On the cusp of greatness, Anton learns the truth about his mother and the lengths Coleman went to to keep him as his very own.  He begins to question who he really is—he is nobody's son, yet everybody's son.  

 

Umrigar explores class, race, power, privilege, and morals in this emotional heart-wrenching story that will stay with the reader long after it is finished.

In the Story Hour, an arrange marriage finds Lakshmi, a woman from a small town in India, working in her husband's restaurant in the American midwest. She is exhausted, unhappy, isolated. She attempts suicide and comes under the care of Maggie, a psychologist and African American.

 

Maggie is married to an Indian, Sudhir, who came as a student and stayed on to become a professor and American citizen.

 

Maggie and Lakshmi are from different cultures, have different family dynamics but their similarities as women, indeed as human beings transcends the patient doctor relationship and finds them becoming friends.

 

Gradually understanding grows and with Maggie's help and guidance economic disparity between the two diminishes.

 

But when secrets are revealed both judge each other unfairly in the most part because, despite their affection for each other, it's impossible for each to overcome the biases ingrained by culture.

 

The relationship seems irreparably damaged but one woman is prepared to risk everything for make it right again.

 

Author Thrity Umrigar really shines a light on how our background and different cultures frame the way we see ourselves, our fellow human beings and the world around us. It's also a realistic, compassionate and hopeful look at the lives of millions of immigrant women from third world countries who come to reside in the west.

 

The story has depth, humour, passion and compassion and remarkable insight. A true novel for the twenty-first century.

 

 

Gosh, I began this novel with such high hopes!!! It contains some of the most provocative and lyrically poetic prose that I've ever read, but it does not reach any sort of.... well... it just goes no where. I feel smarter about Bombay, and India in general, and I have to admire the fact that the two main characters don't fall into each other's arms and proclaim that the class divide will never keep them apart, but still, I already KNOW that education is good, and that money and intellect will grant one power, I don't need to be told this - endlessly - in novel form.

I had such high hopes. It seemed to be going somewhere. Ultimately, it was just a sad book about sad people who experience no growth and just keep in the slots which birth assigned. Very, very disappointing. Sooooooo poetic, just heartbreakingly poetic.

I have always been fascinated by this intersection of gender and class--how the lives of women from the working class and the middle-class seemed at once so connected and so removed from each other.- Thrity Umrigar

 

The Story Hour is a compelling, close examination of the lives of two quite different women brought together under near tragic circumstances, whose progressive relationship forces them to reveal dark secrets and confront the flaws in themselves.

 

Lakshmi Patil, a dutiful eldest daughter who practically raises her motherless younger sister, has made a ritual of self sacrifice and unwavering responsibility, is challenged by the sham of a marriage that immerses her in a deep well of guilt, isolation and unhappiness. Relocated from India to a new life in America, Lakshmi clings to memories of her homeland, but her sense of who she is, is blurred. The overwhelming loneliness of being uprooted from her native home, alienated from family and commanded by her husband never to speak to them, laboring in their restaurant or stuck in their smelly room surrounded by solitude: Lakshmi is pushed to attempted suicide.

 

Maggie Bose, a self-assured, experienced psychologist, steadfastly keeps a professional distance from her patients, from "So much pain. So many secrets. She felt burdened by the weight of other people's secrets, their grief, their trust, their blinking anticipation, their eager faces, the hunger with which they looked at her, expecting answers, expecting cures, expecting miracles," but takes pity on, and befriends the young, uneducated Indian woman whom she sees as trapped in a dismal marriage to a dominating man.

 

As Lakshmi's and Maggie's relationship progresses, as the connective threads are inextricably sewn; detoxing, cathartic and introspective moments of confession that would normally bind more tightly a blossoming friendship, expose instead their shameful secrets and duplicity.

 

You build your 'temple of happy' on someone else's grave.

 

The Story Hour explores the fragility of a friendship shaking on a foundation of mistrust, misunderstandings, and the heartbreak that betrayal imparts; it seeks out the way to forgiveness, absolution, a second chance, that elusive miracle, hope.

Umrigar sensitive tale of an Indian woman's experience torn from her native home, of class and cultural differences and perspectives, pulsate off the pages with insight and deep emotion.
It wasn't difficult to be immediately pulled into the story from the very start, proving the remarkable, spellbinding gift of this storyteller to mesmerize her readers with her beautiful prose.

I had my first taste of Thrity Umrigar's exquisite writing years ago through her touching novel The Space Between Us, but not quite sure why it took so long to bridge the gap to her other novels. I'll be sure not to let the hours turn to years before reading more of her work.

 

 

The Story Hour by Thrity Umrigar is story of two women who are more than just doctor and patient but not quite friends either. Maggie ends up as Lakshmi's psychologist after Lakshmi attempts suicide. Through alternating chapters in their voices, we learn of Maggie's and Lakshmi's stories. For a variety of reasons, this is not the book for me. However, based on how many people have recommended the author, maybe I will try a different book.

 

Read my complete reivew at: http://www.memoriesfrombooks.com/2014/10/the-story-hour.html