Helpful Score: 10
This is the story of a peasant family living in a small village in India. The modern world is encroaching as a huge tannery moves into town.
The story is told through the voice of the mother of the family. Her family is very poor. They rent their land and try to grow enough rice and vegetables to make it through the year. It's a cruel life. However, the family considers themselves better off than others who don't even have the land to work.
This book is well written. It's is strangely uplifting despite the despair of such a harsh life. The style reminded me of Pearl Buck's The Good Earth.
The story is told through the voice of the mother of the family. Her family is very poor. They rent their land and try to grow enough rice and vegetables to make it through the year. It's a cruel life. However, the family considers themselves better off than others who don't even have the land to work.
This book is well written. It's is strangely uplifting despite the despair of such a harsh life. The style reminded me of Pearl Buck's The Good Earth.
Helpful Score: 2
This is a beautiful and eloquent story that tells of a simple peasant woman in a primitive village in India whose whole life was a gallant and persistent battle to care for those she loved. This novel is a story of a woman's struggle to find happiness in a changing India. Married as a child bride to a tenant farmer she had never seen, she worked side by side in the field with her husband to wrest a living from land that was rafaged by droughts, monsoons, and insects. With remarkable fortitude and courage, she sought to meed the challenge of changing times and to fight poverty and diaster. She saw one of her infants die of starvation, her daughter become a prostitute, and her sons leave the land for jobs that she distrusted. And somehow she survived....
Helpful Score: 2
beautifully written story of a woman's life in rural India. Each chapter is a glance into her world and her struggles.
Helpful Score: 1
I enjoyed this book tremendously. Markandaya is a storyteller by nature and truly captures human nature. I love reading about other cultures. This wasn't overwhelmingly about culture, but it was a a story that transcends culture... a story of courage, poverty, struggle, human strength. I recommend it!
Helpful Score: 1
An inspiring read about a woman in India and her strugles to support her family, and to later have her son's support her and her husband.
Interesting to hear about the culture of dowries, arranged marriages, and prefering male children and being disappointed in birthing daugheters.
Loved it.
Interesting to hear about the culture of dowries, arranged marriages, and prefering male children and being disappointed in birthing daugheters.
Loved it.
