While her lover sleeps, a young woman named Rakhee Singh slips off her engagement ring, leaves it on the nightstand and sets off from metro New York to India on a journey to reclaim her past and, she hopes, to rediscover herself.
The powerful first chapter that opens Kamala Nair's debut novel, The Girl in the Garden, encourages the reader to take up the narrator's cause as she travels eastward in the present and inward back through time. In this quietly told, incredibly gripping novel--narrated in one long flashback--we meet a series of fully drawn characters embroiled in domestic complications. Rahkee recalls the summer of her 10th year, when her emotionally troubled mother mysteriously whisks her daughter away from home and father in Plainfield, Minn., back to her ancestral village in India. Once there, Rakhee becomes acquainted with an unfamiliar culture and relatives she had never known, and discovers a walled garden hidden behind the family home. She and her young cousins are told the garden is off-limits--a rakshasi, or witch, is said to inhabit it.
This restriction piques Rakhee's interest; she decides to see for herself who or what resides in the thicket. It's not what she expected, of course. At the heart of the garden and the novel are family secrets. The hidden garden becomes a metaphor for what happens when we compartmentalize the sorrows and challenges of our lives and the consequences of hiding from the truth rather than facing it. These central issues ultimately force Rakhee to circle back to the present and reconcile her own life's contradictions. --Kathleen Gerard, blogger at Reading Between the Lines