The Abundance
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Mala and Ronak are adults now. They've married, begun their own families and moved away from the suffocating world of their first generation immigrant parents. But when they learn their mother has only months to live, the focus of their world returns to her home. Having shown little interest in the Indian cuisine they eat at every gathering, Mala decides to master the recipes her mother learned at her own mother's knee. And as they cook together, mother and daughter begin to confront the great divisions of their lives, and finally heal their fractured relationship. But when Ronak comes up with a plan to memorialise his mother, the hard-won peace between them is tested to its limits. Written with tenderness and wry compassion, Amit Majmudar has captured anew the immigrant experience, the clash of cultures, the conflicts of assimilation, and, most poignantly, the tangled ties between generations.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Majmudar (Partitions) returns with a moving story of motherhood across cultural divides. After Mala and Ronak's mother tells them she has been diagnosed with cancer, the center of their world shifts from their own children and spouses and back to the woman who raised them. Their mother fears the change her illness will bring, not only to her body but also to the family's comfortable routine. She realizes some good might result, though, when Mala unexpectedly decides to learn how to cook the Indian meals she ate as a child. During the hours they spend together making dahi and rotli, Mala and Ronak's mother (never given her own name) muses upon watching them grow up and mature, from struggling as the children of immigrants in the Midwest to becoming parents themselves. Majmudar's precise dialogue saves the novel from its few moments of sentimentality and makes the theme of the divide between immigrant parent and first-generation children seem surprisingly fresh. Powerful in its simplicity and honesty, The Abundance reminds us of the way our roots inevitably shape our adult selves.
