Remember all those hippies who ran off to India in the 1970s in search of enlightenment? One of the little delights of Indira Ganesan's Inheritance is getting an Indian view of how those truth-seekers fit into the culture and affected the people around them. A kind of mild feminism guides this unassuming novel of adolescence and self-discovery, set on an island off the Indian coast. The story meanders with its 15-year-old narrator, Sonil, whose chronic poor health has landed her a prolonged break from school at the home of her grandmother. There, time drifts, and events unfold in the flat, unquestioned perspective of youth. Sonil is fatherless, and men appear only fleetingly as silhouettes, sharply outlined but unfathomable. Her relationships with the three generations of women in the household--especially her hostility toward her aloof, eccentric mother--define the girl. But she encounters a young American man, in India to study Ayurvedic medicine, and for a while, the chaos of Sonil's sensuality focuses on Richard, a passionate but emotionally immature hippie, twice her age.

Through her short-lived relationship with him (lots of lovemaking to the music of Bob Dylan, George Harrison, and the Talking Heads), the wavering line of her life begins to trace a circle, leading her back to her mother and her unknown father, an American who disappeared from India before Sonil was born. Her inheritance, it seems, is a mandala, full of repeating patterns, which, as the book ends, Sonil is beginning to draw deliberately. Ganesan's prose style has a frank simplicity that is pleasing but evanescent.


From School Library Journal
YA-In this coming-of-age novel set in India, 15-year-old Sonil spends the summer at her adored grandmother's home on a lush island off the subcontinent's coast. There, she meets her distant, enigmatic mother, who sent her away when she was a baby to live with her aunts on the mainland. Sonil yearns to know why and who her American father might be. Ganesan's lithe and sensuous tale follows Sonil as she spends languid days with her great-uncle, talks about boys with her favorite cousin, and spies on her mysteriously remote and silent mother. She is angered by the woman's frequent evening absences from the house and her refusal to talk to her. It is only through her passionate relationship with an American twice her age whom she meets in the marketplace that she is able to begin to understand and forgive her mother. Toward the end of the novel, Sonil says, "I had thought that inheritance was inescapable. It is, but not in the ways I imagined....I am a random mix of genes and attributes. I do not have to be like my mother...yet a shard of her exists in everything I do." Inheritance deals with universal dramas of love and loss, family and acceptance. It should reassure young adults that the idiosyncrasies and eccentricities of families and the need to accept them cross many cultures.Pat Bangs, Fairfax County Public Library, VACopyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
In 1985, Sonil, a physically fragile 15-year-old romantic innocent, spends a healing summer on the island of Pi off the coast of India. She wonders about her long-lost American father and despairs that her mysterious, unfriendly India-born mother will ever show her any sign of affection. Sonil's grandmother, cousin Jani, and two half-sisters (all by different fathers) wish their love for Sonil could fill the emptiness caused by so much maternal hostility, but it is only in the arms of 30-year-old Richard, an American surrogate father figure studying Eastern religions, that Sonil finds relief from her breaking heart and sickly body. Lush and stylish, this gentle, if idealized, story of a first love affair by the author of The Journey (LJ 5/15/90) is perhaps a more dazzling international version of Judy Blume's perennially popular Forever (1975), but it is well worth reading.?Beth E. Andersen, Ann Arbor Dist. Lib., Mich.Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Booklist
Ganesan, a lithe and sinuous storyteller, has set her second novel, like her first, The Journey (1990), on Pi, a tiny make-believe island floating serenely off the coast of India. Pi is relatively free of the strict social codes found on the mainland, which is a good thing for the extended family of eccentrics Ganesan portrays through the eyes of her intrepid 15-year-old narrator, Sonil. Sonil knows almost nothing about her long-gone American father and actually knows very little about her mother because she was raised by her aunts. But during this decisive summer, both she and her enigmatic mother are living with her grandmother, and it is a time of reckoning for all concerned, especially Sonil's cousin, who chooses to enter a convent instead of getting married, and Sonil, who discovers that romance and sexuality are not the same as love. Ganesan accomplishes so much in this gracefully sensual tale, pondering questions of spirituality and forgiveness and taking the measure of just how much we inherit from our family, no matter how unconventional its configuration may be. Ganesan, like Arundhati Roy and Chitra Divakaruni, is part of a glorious flowering of contemporary Indian literature. Donna Seaman


From Kirkus Reviews
Like a series of evocative miniatures, a second novel by Ganesan (The Journey, 1990) that suggests the idyll of an imperfect matriarchy. Narrated by 15-year-old Sonil in brief episodes and glimpses, the story follows the girl's roundabout but assured awakening to herself on the multicultural, contemporary island of Pi off the Indian subcontinent. Though writing about a nearly Edenic place, Ganesan takes care that the Pi also come across as not altogether unworldly. And so we meet a down-at-the-heels collection of cosmopolitan wanderers and odd locals, earthy yet only inches removed from myth: Sonil's much-married and socially reviled, rebellious mother, who had more or less abandoned her daughter from the start; Sonil's generous and adorable grandmother, who--in a pleasantly shambling way--can do no wrong; her repressed but passionate cousin Jani, who desperately flees her suitors for a convent; and her ethereal great-uncle, a painter whose ``body was merely pretending to be flesh.'' Sonil meets an American who is twice her age; falls in love for the first time; and is left hanging when this love object picks up and leaves. Ultimately, Sonil's grandmother dies, though before that, people float in and land fleetingly, like mirages, on the island, which begins to resemble a microcosmic kaleidoscope of the human, the natural, and the magical folded into one--a small, storied panoply of Ganesan's imagination. But her style is relaxed, even casual. Unlike the righteous, raised tone of epics, polemics, and fictional creeds, hers is kind and humorous: ``I thought about animals and their capacity for change, how species evolved,'' Sonil muses. ``And I began to think of the ability to abstain from love as a particularly human trait. But . . . surely there were earthworms that were monkish in their habits?'' But the character of Sonil's American hippie boyfriend is tritely drawn, and the book's first third is too slowly plotted, like an anticlimactic reverie. Still, Ganesan's ingenious charms as a social and spiritual observer bejewel the novel. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.


Book Description
"A lithe and sinuous storyteller . . . Ganesan, like Arundhati Roy and Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, is part of a glorious flowering of contemporary Indian literature."—Donna Seaman, BooklistIndira Ganesan was born in Srirangam, India. She is the author of the widely acclaimed novel The Journey.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

In her first novel since her debut with The Journey, Indira Ganesan gives us the story of Sonil, who at fifteen has come to her adored grandmother's house on a paradisaical island off the coast of India ("a tiny eye, to the teardrop that was Sri Lanka") to mend her shaky health. She has been living on the mainland with her aunts, to whom she was sent by her mother when she was a baby, and she yearns to find out why she was exiled and where her American father might be. Little by little, her spirits revive, and we see Sonil begin to move out of the magical world of her grandmother's compound into the wider life of the island, until she finds the perfect escape from her mother's reflection in a passionate affair with a young American. It is through her feelings for him that she begins to discover the means to forgive her mother and to look to herself for the answers she will need in the coming years.

FROM THE CRITICS

School Library Journal

YA-In this coming-of-age novel set in India, 15-year-old Sonil spends the summer at her adored grandmother's home on a lush island off the subcontinent's coast. There, she meets her distant, enigmatic mother, who sent her away when she was a baby to live with her aunts on the mainland. Sonil yearns to know why and who her American father might be. Ganesan's lithe and sensuous tale follows Sonil as she spends languid days with her great-uncle, talks about boys with her favorite cousin, and spies on her mysteriously remote and silent mother. She is angered by the woman's frequent evening absences from the house and her refusal to talk to her. It is only through her passionate relationship with an American twice her age whom she meets in the marketplace that she is able to begin to understand and forgive her mother. Toward the end of the novel, Sonil says, "I had thought that inheritance was inescapable. It is, but not in the ways I imagined....I am a random mix of genes and attributes. I do not have to be like my mother...yet a shard of her exists in everything I do." Inheritance deals with universal dramas of love and loss, family and acceptance. It should reassure young adults that the idiosyncrasies and eccentricities of families and the need to accept them cross many cultures.-Pat Bangs, Fairfax County Public Library, VA

Edward Hower