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A review by rac653
Lucky Boy by Shanthi Sekaran
I started out liking this book and by the end I was just annoyed. I have to say, even though this is a decently long book, I found it very readable and compelling, and I breezed through it. My issues with it were how Kavya vs Soli were portrayed. I read reviews saying that the author was "obviously pro-birth mother" but I didn't find that to be accurate at all. It was very odd to me that the author chose to delve so deep into Kavya and Rishi's lives, and barely even scratch the surface of Soli's. For example, Kavya gets a fully fleshed out mom, a childhood, memories, opinionated coworkers, a husband with his own POV, and so on. Soli gets....trauma. She does not elaborate on why she would want to risk her life to leave her hometown, does not elaborate on her childhood, does not experience (in my opinion) the same range of emotions that Kavya does. It's just trauma after trauma, and even that she doesn't elaborate on very much. I was so confused why none of the people in Soli's life got to have a perspective like Rishi did. I would have loved to hear Silvia's perspective or even Mrs. Cassidy. What was the POINT of Rishi's "clean air" story line? Also you're honestly going to tell me he broke into Soli's parent's house in the middle of the night, got caught, and left without a scratch? There were so many inaccuracies and things that didn't make sense in this book, even though in the acknowledgements it seems that the author did a lot of research.
This book seems geared toward people who have never given two shits about immigrants or stopped to think about what they go through to come to this country. If you have literally never once had empathy for an immigrant or for children being separated from their families at the border, this book is for you. You will get a tiny, half baked glimpse into what it's like to have your child taken from you. But you will really end up just feeling bad for the American woman who decided he should legally be her child because "they could give him a better life."
Also, this storyline was almost exactly the same as the storyline from Little Fires Everywhere, which was odd because they came out in the same year. And you know what's crazy? Neither of them did a good job at portraying the birth mother as a real, dynamic, dimensional human being and instead used them to create tension and a moral dilemma for the reader. I hope to find a book that actually portrays the immigrant experience and motherhood in a way that does not make her compete with the American woman pining for a baby of her own.
This book seems geared toward people who have never given two shits about immigrants or stopped to think about what they go through to come to this country. If you have literally never once had empathy for an immigrant or for children being separated from their families at the border, this book is for you. You will get a tiny, half baked glimpse into what it's like to have your child taken from you. But you will really end up just feeling bad for the American woman who decided he should legally be her child because "they could give him a better life."
Also, this storyline was almost exactly the same as the storyline from Little Fires Everywhere, which was odd because they came out in the same year. And you know what's crazy? Neither of them did a good job at portraying the birth mother as a real, dynamic, dimensional human being and instead used them to create tension and a moral dilemma for the reader. I hope to find a book that actually portrays the immigrant experience and motherhood in a way that does not make her compete with the American woman pining for a baby of her own.