Desirable Daughters

By Bharati Mukherjee
Hyperion (2002), $24.95

Readers unversed in Indian culture will find Bharati Mukherjee's fifth novel a delightful and enlightening education. This brilliant coming-of-age story tells the tale of the devoted youngest daughter of a traditional Bengali clan and her journey to protect her family in the face of peril. Tara Chatterjee, now a divorced single mother living in San Francisco, finds herself face to face with a young man claiming to be the abandoned son of her oldest sister, a family secret that comes as somewhat of a surprise. In fact, it's a secret so scandalous that it threatens to destroy the clan's social standing in India's caste society. Despite her family's objections, Tara feels she has no choice: She must confront her relatives' skeletons, even if doing so stands to disgrace them.

An award-winning fiction writer, Mukherjee keeps you on the edge of your seat throughout the book. She introduces you to the intricate background of this traditional Hindu Indian family using flashbacks of Tara's childhood and legends from her family's past, while still keeping the rhythm of the story flowing. I found the story a bit too fast-paced; the author's frequent nostalgic looks at Tara's past in India left me with a slight case of literary vertigo. For example, in one passage Tara starts off at home, thinking about her current dilemma and letting her mind drift off to the past, and then suddenly she's visiting the New Jersey home of her oldest sister. I could only guess when and how she'd gotten there.

Most disturbing was the anticlimactic ending, which left me scratching my head. I hope that this book is the first of a series; if not, the mysterious disappearance of one the central characters and the unresolved "coming out" of Tara's son will leave readers screaming for closure.