When Lila, a rising 29-year-old Indian American editor based in Brooklyn, unexpectedly inherits a huge ancestral home in the center of Calcutta, she must return to India, where she must also confront her mother after a decade's estrangement, along with her grandmother and extended family, all of whom still live in the house, and resent her sudden legacy.
Engrossing ... Lila is an immensely engaging narrator, impressively confident but endearingly vulnerable ... Roy deftly outlines the stakes in an upcoming election that could bring a conservative party to power and crush the liberal spirit of tolerance in Kolkata. It’s a small world after all. Eight thousand miles doesn’t feel so far away when we’re traveling with a writer this inviting.
The pacing in the first half of the book is painfully languid, littered with one too many opaque hints of trauma and violence. As Roy coyly obfuscates the reasons behind everyone’s erratic angst...it is never clear whose pain and what scars these hints refer to ... When Roy depicts the ugliness in motherhood, that her writing truly shines: There’s no tidy healing, no magical embrace that washes away the hideousness of memory.
