Keya Das's Second Act
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4.5 • 4 Ratings
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
A “painfully beautiful” (Booklist), heartwarming, and charmingly funny debut novel about how a discovered box in the attic leads one Bengali American family down a path toward understanding the importance of family, even when splintered.
Shantanu Das is living in the shadows of his past. In his fifties, he finds himself isolated from his traditional Bengali community after a devastating divorce from his wife, Chaitali; he hasn’t spoken to his older daughter, Mitali, in months. Years before, when his younger daughter, Keya, came out as gay, no one in the Das family could find the words they needed. As each worked up the courage to say sorry, fate intervened: Keya was killed in a car crash.
So, when Shantanu finds an unfinished play Keya and her girlfriend had been writing, Mitali approaches the family with a wild idea: What if they were to put it on? It would be a way to honor Keya and finally apologize. Here, it seems, are the words that have escaped them over and over again.
Set in the vibrant world of Bengalis in the New Jersey suburbs, this “delightful” (Diksha Basu, author of The Windfall) debut novel is both poignant and, at times, a surprisingly hilarious testament to the unexpected ways we build family and find love, old and new.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Deb's charming if not always credible debut novel (after the memoir Missed Translations) charts a middle-class Bengali family's grief and gradual recovery in a New Jersey suburb. When high school student Keya Das dies in a car accident, her mother, father and, older sister are stricken with sorrow and guilt. Keya had been estranged from her family for two months before her death, after she had come out to them about being gay, to which the family members responded less than enthusiastically. The novel begins five years after Keya's death. Keya's mom and dad, because of the strain of the tragedy, have divorced. Her anthropology professor dad, Shantanu, still grieving, is cleaning out the family home before moving. He discovers an unfinished play about their relationship cowritten by Keya and her girlfriend, Pamela, and shares it with his ex-wife, Chaitali, and older daughter, Mitali. Together, they decide to honor Keya by mounting a production in New Brunswick. A melodramatic subplot involving Mitali's mildly unhinged drummer boyfriend, complete with cocaine addiction and underworld chicanery, threatens to derail the novel, but Deb packs in plenty of well-observed domestic details. Though it's mixed bag, Deb knows how to craft a family narrative.
