The trend for fiction about the horrors of overseas countries continues to gain momentum. As the years go by, the women of the East, Africa and Asia are still suffering and suffering.
The flow of their suffering is not drying up, so our publishers are already taking whole series for this case, and soon individual publishers will appear... "The sky is the color of hope" is the debut novel by Amita Tracy, a writer of Indian origin who, in addition to writing books, is also engaged in social work: helps to rescue Indian girls from sexual slavery. Actually, her first book is devoted to this topic.
Mukta and Tara were as close as sisters in childhood. Tara's father took Mukta to his house to save her from an unenviable fate: the girl had to follow in the footsteps of her mother and grandmother and become a temple prostitute. But when Mukta was 12, she was stolen from her home.
Attempts to find the girl were unsuccessful. After growing up, Tara returned to India from the United States to try to find her friend after 11 years. "The sky is the color of hope" compositionally consists of two storylines: one tells us about the life of Tara, the second - about Mukta. At some point, these lines intersect, but living together takes up only a small part of the narrative.
To be honest, the line of Tara did not cause any feelings in me at all, although, I must pay tribute, Amita Tracy tried to show us not an ideal girl in all respects, who is bravely looking for her childhood friend, but a heroine confused in herself, eaten up by guilt and trying first of all to close her own gestalt.
As for the Mukta line, it is, of course, more interesting, but not at the expense of the heroine's personality, but only because it shows the reader "this unknown India" with its traditions, from which the eyes climb on the forehead and the hair on the hands stand at attention! In general, "The Sky is the color of hope" seemed to me an artistic reworking of a real story from the category of those described in many non-fiction works, such as " Hello! My name is Lun."
In this case, the stake was not at all on the characters, not on the story, not on the syllable and narrative manner, but on the facts shocking to the Western reader that sexual slavery and kidnapping still exist in the 21st century.
The cult of the goddess Yellamme, whose servants have to sleep with everyone from childhood and can't get married and create a normal family, that adult uncles pay money to have sex with eight-year-old girls, that their mothers and grandmothers sometimes do not mind putting a child under some guy and everything like that.
If someone did not have enough of India as a sample of the "God of Trifles" or "White Tiger", and he continues to romanticize this country, not noticing that it is a sample of fierce thrash, then here is "The Sky is the color of hope" - what the doctor attributed to him. By the way, when I started reading this novel, I thought that Tracy would do without tin, because her target audience is women who love books in the spirit of Khaled Hosseini (I think you already remembered him yourself when you read how this book begins.
Because it really smacks of a girl's version of "Running after the Wind") and the "Wind Rose" series of the Arcadia publishing house, but the author decided not to spare her readers, and described some rather unpleasant moments in great detail. My mother would definitely not sleep at night after reading this book, so if you are very impressionable and do not digest scenes of physical and sexual violence against women and children, then think about whether you really need to read Amita Tracy's debut work.
In general, "The Sky is the color of hope" is a completely mediocre book, I don't want to praise or scold it, this is the case when the decision on whether to read or not to read can be quite made on the basis of an annotation, because after reading it, it is immediately approximately clear what kind of novel it will be.
But I will still mention a few things that pushed me away. Firstly, it is obvious that you can take a girl away from India, but you can never shake India out of a girl, and therefore there is no escape from Bollywood family ties, and this was completely unnecessary. Secondly, there is another completely unnecessary plot line - a love one: I would understand if we had a documentary book in front of us, then you can't throw the words out of the song, and if one of the heroines found her love during all this turmoil.
Even so, but in this case, this line is here simply because, according to the law of the genre, there should be at least one wedding in the book, and if the heroine is a woman, then she is obliged to find her love and find "female happiness", and, of course, all writing courses teach that in addition to the main storyline in the novel there should be secondary ones, and what could be easier than to draw some boyfriend to the heroine.
Thirdly, the intrigue with Uncle Anupam seems very improbable, again, in the best traditions of Indian cinema. In general, it seems to me that everything written by Indian authors should then be read by their non-Indian friends, in order to remove the numerous " Jimmy-Jimmy! Acha-Acha!", birthmarks and strange villainy.
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