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As the book is inspired by the true story of Nepali migrants it made it to my must-read list. The book is below average in terms of content and storytelling. As the same issue has been picked by other authors who have done a commendable job, this book failed my expectation. I would not recommend the book as there are other books in the same subject matter.
Brilliant effort by an English woman married to a Nepali and lived in Nepal for most part of her life--to publish a fiction novel about her adopted country. The way she describes life here during insurgency years is effective. Besides she describes the culture as observed by a writer who lived here after her marriage only. It can not be as authentic as a native writer but it comes very close. It at the same times also give a critical outlook of the culture--about which a native eye could be blind. For most part it is genuine, as it was a culture so different than her own. She has gone a long way to understand it. So there is an endearing integrity and honesty to it. The writer was a regular contributor to the discourse of the time on various aspects of the life in Nepal through her newspaper columns. Like ever--her writing is in a classical style in this novel and there are enough twists and turns in the story to keep a reader engaged. It displays that she was an accomplished author to handle even as complicated subject as this novel of her has taken up. She passed away a few years back, as the newspapers reported. Reading her novel now reminded one also of her contribution to the development of English writing here, besides the journalism, which was in its infancy till only a few decades back.
This is a powerful and important book although it took me a while to get into despite my interest in the subject and the country of Nepal. Perhaps the novel would have grabbed me earlier if it had been more skillful edited: there was quite a lot of repetition that surely any good editor should have picked up. I was also a bit puzzled that the book seemed a bit outdated and I wondered when it was actually written - there were lots of small details that made it feel as if I written 20 years or more ago, although the publication date was 2018. Whatever, the novel is an absorbing account of how the poor and misinformed are exploited by unscrupulous people who already have enough money. Sadly the exploitation of Nepalis continues too!
Dreadful read. The only reason you should be picking up this book is to learn how not to write; and unless the proceeds from the sale of the book goes towards families of migrants laborers killed or injured during work, you are better off getting a pirated copy.
I strongly wanted to leave the book incomplete but I chugged along anyway hoping maybe the author would redeem it at some point. Unfortunately, it only ever went downhill. The whole book was basically a badly written, horribly edited diatribe of an ostensibly "liberal" minded privileged person, masked as a novel. And for a book that is so insistent of adding political analysis at every turn, it was an abysmal arm-chair analysis bereft of any nuance.
To cap it off, the work was clearly badly researched or perhaps not researched at all. It is littered with factual inaccuracies. Take the instance of Subhadra getting "distinction." Haru Prasad is supposed to have travelled to Dubai a year before maoist insurgency - so he left around 1996 - and returned after 6 years when his daughter takes the SLC so that's 2002 at most 2003. There was no concept of distinction until a few years later.