This one is written by a woman who lives right here in Rhode Island. I have been meaning to read it for a while, but I am just now getting to it. It is a teen novel that is loosely based on some of the experiences of various family members.

Vidya is a 15-year-old girl growing up in a less-than-traditional Brahmin family in WWII Bombay, India. Her father has taken on the view of a new modern India, which is professed by Gandhi. This means more rights for women, such as a promise to Vidya to let her go to college. He is also mirroring Gandhi's professed ideas on peaceful resistance in order to win freedom from their British colonial reviews.

One day, while bringing her home, Vidya's father gets caught up on a protest and is beaten serverely while trying to help a woman. As a result, he is left with a horrible brain injury, leaving him a shell of the man he onace was. Viday and her family are forced to go live with her father's family in Madras.

This means not only dealing with her father's terrible injury and leaving everythign she once knew behind, but it also means she is forced to live under the rule of her horrible aunt. Vidya and her mother quickly become little more than servants in the household as the men spend all of their time separate and lving on the second floor.

One of her tasks is to watch after one her other aunt's babies. While she is doing this she goes upstairs into her grandfather's cherished library, where she is able to retreat into the worlds of literature, philosophy, and other great works. It is through this, that she finds a way to survive.

One of the most interesting things about the book is the fact that Vidya quickly learns that she does not like Jane Austen, yet this book and her life greatly parallels the difficult lives of Austen's heroeines even while being set in India rather than in Victorian or Edwardian England.

The writing is extremely rich, and it is easy to be drawn into the lives of such rich characters. It was a thoroughly enjoyable tale.