The 11 stories in Patel’s debut find his characters—mostly first-generation Indian-Americans; usually young, or youngish; often in Midwestern cities—navigating love, loss, and disappointment.
Patel’s Indian-American characters aren’t reduced to the status of model minorities or 7-11 owners. Instead, they’re introduced through a panorama of character studies ... Patel gets the patter of the Indian-American household just right; the prim palaver around the tea salver strikes the right balance of nosiness and restraint ... Patel’s characters may not learn from experience, but they pursue it with vigor — part of what makes the collection so refreshing. Where so much fiction about the immigrant family tends to become an exercise in anthropology, a study of inherited customs foisted on a child caught between cultures, Patel’s characters are fundamentally engaged with the world ... His gifts are not so much psychological as dramatic. He has a screenwriter’s knack for getting everyone in the same room, and the early stories fuse plot and subplot in a consistently surprising fashion.
Debut-author Patel’s 10 compact yet meaty stories feature characters—most of them first-generation Indian Americans, as the author is—trying to navigate a world full of expectations (go to college, land a prestigious job, get married, have children) only to find themselves continually thwarted ... Patel explores universal themes in unexpected ways and excels at portraying nuanced characters in even the briefest stories. Readers in search of a fresh new voice should be on the lookout for Patel.
The 11 seemingly casual and quietly feverish stories in Patel’s debut follow the plight of young first- or second-generation Indian-Americans. Some characters are gay and some straight, but most of them have grown up in suburban Midwest towns where they are viewed as vaguely exotic as, in an effort to find love, they struggle to please or break away from their families. Expected to become doctors or lawyers, they often rebel in sneaky or ineffective ways ... Patel has a knack for depicting the gap between how characters experience their lives and how they are expected to be seen—and how those gaps can widen into life-changing fractures. This is a perceptive, moving collection.
