The Americans by Chitra ViraraghavanMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
More of a series of vignettes or novellas than one full book. At times it is very difficult to keep everyone straight and how they may interact with each other. I never did understand just how this was all supposed to come together and felt that most of the stories had no endings and that left me feeling cheated.
This book is important because of how the author chooses to portray Americans. I find that to be very telling.
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SYNOPSIS: A POIGNANT AND UNIVERSAL STORY ABOUT THE IMMIGRANT EXPERIENCE AND THE SEARCH FOR IDENTITY Tara, a single Indian woman in her mid-thirties, travels from Chennai to America to look after her teenage niece while her sister Kamala is dealing with her autistic son's treatment and issues at school. But theirs is just one story of many. Expertly woven together, The Americans tells the stories of eleven Indians, whose lives span the country from Louisville to Chicago to Los Angeles to Portland, to Boston, all navigating life in a foreign land. And all of their stories connect back to Tara. For fans of Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies and Dinaw Mengestu's The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears, The Americans is an eloquent and heart-warming debut from an exciting new voice that illuminates questions of race, ethnicity and point of origin, and explores the puzzles of identity, place and human connection.
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