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A review by moholub
Western Lane by Chetna Maroo
4.0
"In the car park, Ged had asked me if I had thought about what would happen after this. I had and I hadn't. I'd imagined as far as Durham and Cleveland, but then there was a wall. Now I was inside the wall, and all I could do was stay in it."
Eleven-year-old Gopi relies on the game of squash--the rules, the training regimen, the observing and anticipating the next move--to navigate the slow implosion of her family, adrift and directionless in the wake of her mother's death. Squash supplies Gopi both an avenue for processing her grief and a tenuous connection with her struggling father, especially as she feels increasingly lost and alienated from her sisters. "Western Lane" is a slim but powerful novel on moving through the world when nothing seems to make sense anymore, while also a story about finding your own strength to push through the darkness.
Eleven-year-old Gopi relies on the game of squash--the rules, the training regimen, the observing and anticipating the next move--to navigate the slow implosion of her family, adrift and directionless in the wake of her mother's death. Squash supplies Gopi both an avenue for processing her grief and a tenuous connection with her struggling father, especially as she feels increasingly lost and alienated from her sisters. "Western Lane" is a slim but powerful novel on moving through the world when nothing seems to make sense anymore, while also a story about finding your own strength to push through the darkness.