&quto;Lifetimes ago, under a banyan tree in the village of Hasnapur, an astrologer cupped his ear ... and foretold my widowhood and exile," relates Jyoti, fifth cursed daughter in a family of nine. Though she can't escape fate, Jyoti reinvents herself time and again. She leaves her dusty Punjabi village to marry as Jasmine; travels rough, hidden airways and waters to America to reemerge as Jase, an illegal "day mummy" in hip Manhattan; and lands beached in Iowa's farmlands as Jane, mother to an adopted teenage Vietnamese refugee and "wife" to a banker. Bharati Mukherjee (The Middleman and Other Stories) makes each world exotic, her lyrical prose broken only by the violence Jasmine almost casually recounts and survives.


From Library Journal
This novel relates both the odyssey and the metamorphosis of a young immigrant from rural India. Her story is often shocking: the violence of the rape that greets her on her first night in America is certainly no greater than that of the crazed Sikh extremists who made her a widow at age 17 in India. Yet neither the character nor her story is held back by this violence. Along the way Jaze acquires three children, including Du, a Vietnamese boy who like herself is an immigrant. Finally, still only in her early twenties, Jaze takes off to pursue her own version of the American dream. The novel has a delicious humor and sexiness that make it a treat to read. The author is this year's winner of the National Book Critics Circle fiction award for The Middleman and Other Stories ( LJ 6/1/88).- Mary Margaret Benson, Linfield Coll. Lib., McMinnville, Ore.Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From 500 Great Books by Women; review by Holly Smith
"Fates are so intertwined in the modern world, how can a god keep them straight?" At the start of this novel we meet Jane, a twenty-four-year-old woman, pregnant and living on an Iowa farm with an adopted son, Du, a teenager from Southeast Asia. Jane began life as Jyoti, born in a village in India. As a teenage bride, then a teenage widow, she is known as Jasmine. With illegal documents she arrives in Florida with the name Jyoti Vijh; while working as an au pair she is Jace. How did she become all these people? Who is the real person? As the novel moves back and forth in time, Jasmine lives in villages in India, travels aboard a boat overflowing with illegal immigrants, and resides in apartments in New York City. Now in Iowa, Jane introduces Indian foods to the local people and heats leftovers in the microwave. Some of the lands Jasmine inhabits are familiar, but, through her eyes, they seem new. Jasmine is ultimately a tale of identity, loss, courage, and hope. "Jyoti of Hasnapur was not Jasmine...that Jasmine isn't this Jane Ripplemeyer...And which of us is the undetected murderer of a half-faced monster, which of us held a dying husband, which of us was raped and raped and raped in boats and cars and motel rooms?" Bharati Mukherjee invites the reader in to explore and learn with them all. -- For great reviews of books for girls, check out Let's Hear It for the Girls: 375 Great Books for Readers 2-14.


Book Description
When Jasmine is suddenly widowed at seventeen, she seems fated to a life of quiet isolation in the small Indian village where she was born. But the force of Jasmine's desires propels her explosively into a larger, more dangerous, and ultimately more life-giving world. In just a few years, Jasmine becomes Jane Ripplemeyer, happily pregnant by a middle-aged Iowa banker and the adoptive mother of a Vietnamese refugee. Jasmine's metamorphosis, with its shocking upheavals and its slow evolutionary steps, illuminates the making of an American mind; but even more powerfully, her story depicts the shifting contours of an America being transformed by her and others like her - our new neighbors, friends, and lovers. In Jasmine, Bharati Mukherjee has created a heroine as exotic and unexpected as the many worlds in which she lives. "Rich...one of the most suggestive novels we have about what it is to become an American." - The New York Times Book Review

FROM THE PUBLISHER

"Mukherjee has eloquently succeeded in creating a kind of impressionistic fable, a prose-poem, about being an exile, a refugee, a spiritual vagabond in the world today."

THE NEW YORK TIMES



Jasmine, widowed at seventeen, and living quietly in the small Indian Village where she was born, wants more. Her journey from rural Hasnapur to southern Florida, to Manhattan and ultimately to Iowa, creates a Jasmine in metamorphsis. Her vision and intelligence reveal America to us in new ways, while her courage and her exhilarating energy draw us irresistibly through pain and tragedy to renewal and hope.



"A beautiful novel, poetic, exotic, perfectly controlled."

SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

Married at 14 and widowed by nationalist-religious violence, but guided by a keen and resolute will, Jasmine leaves India for the U.S., where brutality once again invades her life as she marries and adopts a son. Observing that ``through Jasmine's eyes we see a different America than most of us will ever encounter,'' PW termed this a ``richly atmospheric, beautifully controlled novel.'' Author tour. (Feb.)

Library Journal

This novel relates both the odyssey and the metamorphosis of a young immigrant from rural India. Her story is often shocking: the violence of the rape that greets her on her first night in America is certainly no greater than that of the crazed Sikh extremists who made her a widow at age 17 in India. Yet neither the character nor her story is held back by this violence. Along the way Jaze acquires three children, including Du, a Vietnamese boy who like herself is an immigrant. Finally, still only in her early twenties, Jaze takes off to pursue her own version of the American dream. The novel has a delicious humor and sexiness that make it a treat to read. The author is this year's winner of the National Book Critics Circle fiction award for The Middleman and Other Stories ( LJ 6/1/88).-- Mary Margaret Benson, Linfield Coll. Lib., McMinnville, Ore.

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING