THE SATURDAY MORNING BOOK REPORT
My reviewer criteria. I like light, entertaining novels. I like smaller scale stories rather than epics. I like character focused novels featuring pleasant characters, with a minimum number of unpleasant ones. I greatly value clever and witty writing. I like first person, or close third person narratives. I dislike a lot of "head jumping" between POVs and flashbacks. I want a story, not a puzzle. While I am not opposed to violence, I dislike gore for the sake of gore. I find long and elaborate fight, action, and battle sequences tedious. Plot holes and things that happen for the convenience of the author annoy me. And I fear I'm a born critic in that I don't mind pointing out what I don't like in a story. However, I lay no claim to be the final arbitrator of style and taste, you need to decide for yourself what you like or dislike in a book.
Your opinions are always welcome. Comment below.
The Widows of Malabar Hill by Sunjata Massey C
In this book, the first of a series, Massey set out to tell two stories.
The first story, the title of the book, is a mystery story that takes place in Bombay of 1921. It is centered on the three widows of a rich Indian business man. The first female lawyer in Bombay, the Oxford educated Preveen Mistry, who works for her lawyer father, is tasked with looking after the rights of the three widows, who seem to be giving their inheritance away. A murder ensues.
The second story Massey is the backstory of Preveen. It focuses on the subservient position of women in India, and the oppressive requirements of a certain religion. This backstory takes place in 1916-17.
She slices and dices these two stories in to one disjointed story that skips back and forward in time, a technique that you may already know, I really dislike. I've complained about this type of story often enough. In this case, there was no need to slice and dice Preveen's early history into the murder mystery, since it had nothing to do with the title mystery. Perhaps she did it because she could not have sold the backstory as a standalone novel, so, much like what I think Ellis Peters does with her Cadfael mysteries, she folded the story she wanted to tell into a mystery in order to sell it. And perhaps by splitting the two story lines and sprinkling them throughout the story, she hoped to create more tension in both stories by jumping back and forth between them at cliffhanging moments in both storylines. I just found it annoying.
I also found neither story line all that engaging. Preveen is a nice character, but the plots of both story lines are littered with confusing and unnecessary side characters. On the positive side, the story does include a lot of local details and a window to life in Bombay that time period, which is one of the reasons I chose this book to read. And it did have not one, but two, maps! Hooray! I love maps in books.
It seemed clear Massey wished to highlight the sorry plight of women in the India of 1920's and before, by going into elaborate detail about certain aspects of their lives. I dare say some readers, likely women, will find this interesting, but I wasn't one of them. Nothing wrong with highlighting the plight of women throughout history, but in me, she's preaching to the choir. Almost everywhere in the world, the role of women in society often amounted to plain ill-use, at best. In this story, with its disjointed structure, I could not fully connect with Preveen, and so I just didn't find myself interested in her litany of sufferings in the past and the plight of the widows in the "present." Other readers might.
As for the mystery. This is not a who-dun-it with clues you can follow. The murderer was unlikely, and we had the bog-standard confession at the end to conveniently clear everything up for the reader before the murder then tries to kill Preveen.
All in all, a disappointment.
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