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googie_puvdan's review against another edition
4.0
I'd say the story unravels a bit, takes on too much with the neighbor storyline, 3/4 of the way through. But until then, a solid novel that's beautifully written.
kdominey's review against another edition
emotional
hopeful
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
jwsg's review against another edition
4.0
Tehmina Sethna's husband, Rustom, has passed away. She is on a long visit to her son, Sorab, his American wife, Susan, and her beloved grandson Cavas in Ohio, and trying to decide whether she should return to Bombay or move to the US permanently. The visit is discomfiting on many levels. Rustom and Tehmina used to visit during the summer, for one, when the weather was warm and the family would spend most of their time outdoors. Tehmina is now staying with Sorab and Susan over the winter months, when the family spends most of their time indoors, in each other's faces. Second, Rustom had a way of making every one feel at ease, smoothing things over. His absence not only means the absence of a peacemaker; it also leads to new frictions arising, as Tehmina acutely feels her loss and cannot understand why Sorab and Susan feel she should be trying hard to get over Rustom's death. That Tehmina's stay is a test of sorts for whether she will make a more permanent move to the US also creates additional anxiety and tension.
If Today Be Sweet isn't just a novel about family dynamics, it's also a novel about trying to navigate two cultures. So many novels have been written about the immigrant experience but Umrigar has some lovely metaphors and vivid descriptions to highlight the bewildering contrast between two cultures:
"Tehmina loved being at the farmers' market. She felt comfortable and human, here. The dirty, stagnant water on the floor, the shouts of the brown-skinned, sweaty vendors competing for customers to sample their wares, even the smell of rotting fruit and fresh fish, all felt familiar to her...Touching the fruit and vegetables, occasionally haggling with the vendors, tasting their offered samples of cut fruit, all made her feel human, like the market was rooted in a section of the world she still recognised and lived in. What a contrast it was to the antiseptic, air-conditioned, clean, brightly lit supermarket where the children shopped for their groceries. A place where tomatoes and zucchini came wrapped in plastic trays and where people looked at you funny if you touched a piece of fruit and held it up to your nose. Not that smelling the fruit made any difference - none of the fruits and vegetables in the grocery stores of America had any scent or flavour to them, anyway. It was as if the country was so enthralled with size and colour - the bananas and the peaches and the apples were all bigger than anything Tehmina had ever seen in Bombay - that it had forgotten that fruit was more than decoration. To bite into an American apple or an orange was to taste disappointment. Nothing burst with flavour, nothing tasted as sweet or as tangy the way fruit did in Bombay. Even the roses of America had no perfume to them, a fact that Tehmina still couldn't accept."
"Rain and snow. The perfect way to describe the difference between Bombay and America, Tehmina thought. One as loud, chaotic, tumultuous, and erratic. The other was calm, antiseptic, genteel and polite. So ironic it is, she thought. In Bombay, where everything is dangerous, people live their lives binds, fearlessly, almost thoughtlessly. Here, where there is no reason to fear anything, these people are afraid of life itself. How can they survive like this, watching and weighing everything? From terrorism to germs to the flu, these people were frightened by everything. A whole country going into a panic because there was a shortage of the flu vaccine. And sealing their pain pill bottles in such a tamper-proof way that no adult with arthritis could ever open one of them. Even their drinking straws came wrapped in plastic. Whereas in Bombay, dear God, we breathed the foulest hair and ate food at roadside stalls where they washed the plates in water as brown as mud."
"The simple act of eating an ice-cream cone on the streets and not being followed by the hungry eyes of a hundred children was a freedom, a luxury she had never experienced on the streets of Bombay. In America, she didn't feel leered at by young, sex-starved men, was not self-conscious about her breasts, was not miserably aware of her female body, didn't carry herself in that tense, guarded way that she did back home."
And it is Tehmina's refusal to conform to American norms - norms on grief, norms on minding one's own business - that leads her to intervene when she finds Sorab and Susan's neighbour ill-treating her kids, creating an unanticipated impact on her family and Tehmina herself.
A lovely, lovely read.
If Today Be Sweet isn't just a novel about family dynamics, it's also a novel about trying to navigate two cultures. So many novels have been written about the immigrant experience but Umrigar has some lovely metaphors and vivid descriptions to highlight the bewildering contrast between two cultures:
"Tehmina loved being at the farmers' market. She felt comfortable and human, here. The dirty, stagnant water on the floor, the shouts of the brown-skinned, sweaty vendors competing for customers to sample their wares, even the smell of rotting fruit and fresh fish, all felt familiar to her...Touching the fruit and vegetables, occasionally haggling with the vendors, tasting their offered samples of cut fruit, all made her feel human, like the market was rooted in a section of the world she still recognised and lived in. What a contrast it was to the antiseptic, air-conditioned, clean, brightly lit supermarket where the children shopped for their groceries. A place where tomatoes and zucchini came wrapped in plastic trays and where people looked at you funny if you touched a piece of fruit and held it up to your nose. Not that smelling the fruit made any difference - none of the fruits and vegetables in the grocery stores of America had any scent or flavour to them, anyway. It was as if the country was so enthralled with size and colour - the bananas and the peaches and the apples were all bigger than anything Tehmina had ever seen in Bombay - that it had forgotten that fruit was more than decoration. To bite into an American apple or an orange was to taste disappointment. Nothing burst with flavour, nothing tasted as sweet or as tangy the way fruit did in Bombay. Even the roses of America had no perfume to them, a fact that Tehmina still couldn't accept."
"Rain and snow. The perfect way to describe the difference between Bombay and America, Tehmina thought. One as loud, chaotic, tumultuous, and erratic. The other was calm, antiseptic, genteel and polite. So ironic it is, she thought. In Bombay, where everything is dangerous, people live their lives binds, fearlessly, almost thoughtlessly. Here, where there is no reason to fear anything, these people are afraid of life itself. How can they survive like this, watching and weighing everything? From terrorism to germs to the flu, these people were frightened by everything. A whole country going into a panic because there was a shortage of the flu vaccine. And sealing their pain pill bottles in such a tamper-proof way that no adult with arthritis could ever open one of them. Even their drinking straws came wrapped in plastic. Whereas in Bombay, dear God, we breathed the foulest hair and ate food at roadside stalls where they washed the plates in water as brown as mud."
"The simple act of eating an ice-cream cone on the streets and not being followed by the hungry eyes of a hundred children was a freedom, a luxury she had never experienced on the streets of Bombay. In America, she didn't feel leered at by young, sex-starved men, was not self-conscious about her breasts, was not miserably aware of her female body, didn't carry herself in that tense, guarded way that she did back home."
And it is Tehmina's refusal to conform to American norms - norms on grief, norms on minding one's own business - that leads her to intervene when she finds Sorab and Susan's neighbour ill-treating her kids, creating an unanticipated impact on her family and Tehmina herself.
A lovely, lovely read.
kate66's review against another edition
4.0
Someone recommended this author so I gave her a go.
This is a pleasant, easy to read book where some issues of love and loss are touched on. It's not an in depth, soul search about what happens after the death of a loved one but it is an interesting story all the same.
In the west we have such a different attitude to care of elderly parents. This book shows that whatever we think our parents are/are not capable of - we are more than likely wrong. It's also a look at a newly widowed woman finding her own place in the world after the death of her much more outgoing husband.
I'd definitely read more of her work. This was a pleasant introduction. A little on the fantastical side at times, but still pleasant.
This is a pleasant, easy to read book where some issues of love and loss are touched on. It's not an in depth, soul search about what happens after the death of a loved one but it is an interesting story all the same.
In the west we have such a different attitude to care of elderly parents. This book shows that whatever we think our parents are/are not capable of - we are more than likely wrong. It's also a look at a newly widowed woman finding her own place in the world after the death of her much more outgoing husband.
I'd definitely read more of her work. This was a pleasant introduction. A little on the fantastical side at times, but still pleasant.
red_magpie's review against another edition
4.0
The characters in this book stayed with me for quite some time.
novelesque_life's review against another edition
3.0
3 STARS
"Tehmina Sethna's beloved husband has died this past year and she is visiting her son, Sorab, in his suburban Ohio home. Now Tehmina is being asked to choose between her old, familiar life in India and a new one in Ohio with her son, his American wife, and their child. She must decide whether to leave the comforting landscape of her native India for the strange rituals of life in a new country.
This is a journey Tehmina, a middle-aged Parsi woman, must travel alone.
The Parsis were let into India almost a millennium ago because of their promise to "sweeten" and enrich the lives of the people in their adopted country. This is an ancient promise that Tehmina takes seriously. And so, while faced with the larger choice of whether to stay in America or not, Tehmina is also confronted with another, more urgent choice: whether to live in America as a stranger or as a citizen. Citizenship implies connection, participation, and involvement. Soon destiny beckons in the form of two young, troubled children next door. It is the plight of these two boys that forces Tehmina to choose. She will either straddle two worlds forever and live in a no-man's land or jump into the fullness of her new life in America." (From Amazon)
I like her writing style and characters.
"Tehmina Sethna's beloved husband has died this past year and she is visiting her son, Sorab, in his suburban Ohio home. Now Tehmina is being asked to choose between her old, familiar life in India and a new one in Ohio with her son, his American wife, and their child. She must decide whether to leave the comforting landscape of her native India for the strange rituals of life in a new country.
This is a journey Tehmina, a middle-aged Parsi woman, must travel alone.
The Parsis were let into India almost a millennium ago because of their promise to "sweeten" and enrich the lives of the people in their adopted country. This is an ancient promise that Tehmina takes seriously. And so, while faced with the larger choice of whether to stay in America or not, Tehmina is also confronted with another, more urgent choice: whether to live in America as a stranger or as a citizen. Citizenship implies connection, participation, and involvement. Soon destiny beckons in the form of two young, troubled children next door. It is the plight of these two boys that forces Tehmina to choose. She will either straddle two worlds forever and live in a no-man's land or jump into the fullness of her new life in America." (From Amazon)
I like her writing style and characters.
kellymc03's review against another edition
Certainly not as good as her first book, The Space Between Us"
kkop12's review against another edition
4.0
Interesting book on immigration in regards to a single middle aged Indian woman. It was a quick read and at times seemed a bit easy to predict, but in the end it had a simple message: you need to follow your destiny and not second guess yourself. I could identify since at times I am not the best in regards to decision making and that is exactly what plagued this woman. In the end it was irronic that her actions made the decision for her, with her realization of that decision following.
thedizzyreader's review against another edition
3.0
This was okay. It just didn't grip me/interest me nearly as much as the author's other stories have.