Mother Land by Leah Franqui

Mother Land by Leah Franqui

In this quiet but engaging debut novel, an American teenager spends the summer with her relatives in southern India and gains new insight into her past, her family and her heritage. Born in Kerala, Maya spent the first four years of her life there, cared for mainly by her grandmother, Ammamma, until she was sent to live with her parents in New York. At 15, with her parents' marriage undergoing a rough patch, she is sent back to India to stay with her Aunt Reema and Uncle Sanjay, their 10-year-old daughter, Brindha, and Ammamma at their house in the tea hills above Coimbatore. It's been years since Maya came to visit, and this time she is keenly aware of cultural differences: the different spheres of men and women and the persistence of the caste system. She feels stifled by the attentions of Ammamma and resentful of the time she must spend with the old woman. When Maya suffers an accident while most of the family is away, she and Ammamma grow closer, and Maya learns a hidden family fact. But only when Ammamma falls ill and the entire family gathers, including Maya's parents from New York, does Maya begin to comprehend more deeply the complexities of relationships.

"Franqui has written a beautiful novel featuring nuanced characters struggling to find their way through the landmines of the inevitable culture clashes with surprising, didn’t-see-that-coming moments that carry through to the last page" — Library Journal “Engaging... [Rachel and Swati’s] credible learning from each other make this a worthy tale of bridging a cultural divide.”  — Publishers Weekly “Unexpected...funny and relatable...[A] tender tale of two women who are lost and alone, but who eventually become allies and each other’s biggest champions.”  — BookPage (starred review) “Mother Land is as much a treatise on what it means to belong to oneself as it is a story of two women from opposing cultures.... [The] women discover they are not so different and learn from one another a secret to happiness that surprises them both.”  — San Francisco Book Review “Mother Land is a pleasant story of self-discovery and friendship with plenty of twists and intrigue to keep the reader engaged.”  — Washington Independent Review of Books

Leah Franqui is a graduate of Yale University and received an MFA at NYU-Tisch. She is a playwright and the recipient of the 2013 Goldberg Playwriting Award, and also wrote a web series for which she received the Alfred Sloan Foundation Screenwriting award (aftereverafterwebseries.com). A Puerto Rican-Jewish Philadelphia native, Franqui lives with her Kolkata-born husband in Mumbai. AMERICA FOR BEGINNERS is her first novel.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780062938855
ISBN 10	0062938851
Title	Mother Land
Author	Leah Franqui
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	HarperCollins Publishers Inc
Year published	2021-08-19
Number of pages	400
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.