I swore I wouldn't request any more ARCs ever. I failed - The Unlikely Adventures of the Shergill Sisters by Balli Kaur Jaswal

[I received this book as an ARC from the publisher for the cost of no monies. I thank them kindly for their unrivalled generosity. The Unlikely Adventures of The Shergill Sisters is out June 13th in the UK or now if you're an American.]

Rajni is the oldest of the Shergill sisters. She’s organised (bossy) and dutiful, so when her mother makes a deathbed request that she and her sisters pilgrimage across India to scatter her ashes, Rajni is the one to make it happen, despite her vow to never return there.

Jezmeen, a decade Rajni’s junior, has found herself unexpectedly free of work commitments over the coming weeks. A trip half-way across the world seems like a good as plan as any to let the fuss die down, re-group and work out how she’s going to re-launch her stalled acting career after what’s happened.

Sherina the youngest is quiet and good, a dutiful wife to her perfect husband, respectful to her in-laws. But their - and her husband’s - expectations of her are reaching a crisis point, and the time to make a decision is running out.

Billed as an Indian This Is Where I Leave You, The Unlikely Adventures of the Shergill Sisters is a really good read by an author who has the skill to write flawed characters I really connected with and never once felt like shrieking at. It sounds like such a simple thing but it really isn’t: kudos to Balli Kaur Jaswal for making it look so easy.

It’s an interesting read, rich with cultural detail deftly observed family dynamics. Rajni and Jezmeen dominate the first part of the story - they have plenty of problems with themselves and with each other. It allows Sherina to fade into their background, quiet, trying to get along with everybody, her problems unnoticed and unsuspected by her louder sisters.

However, I did find the premise and its implementation by Rajni a bit contrived. Each chapter is headed by their mother’s guidance notes, where they are to go, what they are to do, what she hopes they will get out of it. I am a big adherent of realism when it comes to found documents in stories so these notes seemed a bit too perfect, although they come into their own as the book goes on. Rajni’s dogged insistence that this show must go on to the end of the line lacked … something.

It also felt as though it lacked the space to breathe. Each of the sisters comes to the journey with their own baggage, they have their fractured relationship, there is What Happened when their mother died, and there is What Will They Go Home To. It’s quite a lot to cram in, and while the gradual unveiling of each story is done well, unspooling in ways I didn’t expect, the resolutions are hit and miss, feeling unexamined for a book which does family dynamics so well.

But, I did enjoy it, despite being unreasonably annoyed at a reference to cilantro (I await correction on what coriander is called in India). It’s funny at times although I’d pull a little short of calling it heartfelt. I think it has the bones to be a terrific film. I also feel like I’m going to get a lot more out of it on a second reading. If the blurb appeals, you should definitely read it.

3.5 stars

A four star read undermined by my knowledge of facts - The Stolen Girl by Renita D'Silva

[This book was provided to me gratis by the publisher, the lovely Bookouture, facilitated in this act of goodness by NetGalley. Thanks guys!]

Renita D'Silva is a name I know although not one which has been attached to the front of any of the books I've read. Her previous two novels, Monsoon Memories and The Forgotten Daughter, have both appeared on my Amazon recommended lists and if I had slightly less to read I would likely have tried one or the other by now. Instead, I was pleasingly approved for the ARC of her new novel, The Stolen Girl, which you will be able to part with your money for from the 12th September.

Despite the cover, The Stolen Girl of the story is 13-year-old Diya who one day has an argument with her mum, strops out, goes back for her coat and finds her mum being taken away by The Rozzers. According to the police, Diya isn't Diya, she's Rupa; and Vani isn't her mother, Vani is the woman who stole her as a baby. Diya's real mother, Aarti, is at a hotel nearby, waiting to take her daughter back to India.

The book follows these three characters, Diya, struggling to adjust to this new truth, Vani, writing letters to her daughter from prison, and Aarti, desperate to finally meet the child she's been searching for all its life. It also attends to Vani and Aarti's pasts, to their childhoods and to the truth about Vani's actions.

The trouble is, despite an introduction in which the author thanks various people for aiding her with research and which I'm confident she has done, it doesn't read like it. Although I'm a pedant, I don't mind minor changes to fact, especially when they improve the flow of the book - things like (as mentioned in the introduction as being incorrect) the number of visitors a prisoner can receive in a day: absolutely fine. However, The Stolen Girl is dependent on things happening in a way other than they would and that's a problem. A big one.

As this is an ARC I don't want to go anywhere near possible spoilers (although I'm happy to provide both mild spoiler and total spoiler explanations via PM/comments) so ...

You know that song by Natasha Beddingfield, These Words? You know the way you can't quite believe that nobody, at any point between the initial rehearsal right the way through to signing off the finished track said, 'Actually Natasha, it's pronounced Hy-per-bo-lee"?

That.

That is the level of error here - the kind of basic thing you'd imagine somebody, at some point between the author writing it and the file being sent to the printer, would have picked up on. Consider the incident in Ireland last October where the Garda removed two children from their Roma families because - thanks to some racial profiling - they believed they'd been abducted; or the case in Greece also at that time which had a different outcome.

Because of this, even when things are correct, I was painfully aware that there is "technically correct" and there is "realistically likely to happen". The Stolen Girl came down far too heavily on the side of the former without reference to the things I'm thinking of.

I also have some minor complaints about the book's own continuity - tiny details like Diya commenting she's already lost weight and her clothes are looser on her after only a few days, maybe a week.

It's frustrating because I did really like a lot of this book. I'm not the biggest reader of women's fiction but I really engaged with this one - my mark of a four star read is that I'm eager to get back to reading it to find out what happens and this, despite those errors, did that. Vani and Aarti's story in particular, while veering a little close to soap-opera plotting for my taste - I liked. It's difficult to write characters who act as these do while keeping them believable, but D'Silva does a good job with the emotional side of the story.

I can't personally recommend this one, but I will emphasise that if you don't care about things being realistic, and/or you have no idea happens when you commit a crime, you probably shouldn't let this review put you off. Read the Kindle sample and if you don't spot any problems you'll likely be fine. There is a lot to like.

However, for me, the problems matter. I'm struggling to decide if this book is actively terrible or just not very good. I want to mark this higher because I did enjoy reading it, but I have to show fidelity to my other reviews. With regret, 1.5 stars.