Featured books

Featured Websites

.: Reader Views Kids

Provides book reviews, by kids, for kids

.: Inside Scoop Live

Provides live author interviews for podcast

.: Authors Access

Provides interviews with experts in the publishing industry

.: Midwest Book Review

Provides post-publication reviews

.: Reader Views

Provides book reviews and author publicity

.: LR Communication Design

Provides professional website design and development

.: Blogging Authors

Provides a place where writers and readers meet

.: Review The Book

Provides 5 books reviews on 10 different sites

.: Best Sellers World

Provides book reviews and author features

.: Feathered Quill Book Reviews

Provides book reviews and author features

reviews

The Sandalwood Tree

Elle Newmark
Atria Books (2011)
ISBN 9781416590590
Reviewed by Enid Grabiner for RebeccasReads (05/11)

As the British are scheduled to leave India for good and new borders are drawn to partition off land to create a Muslim Pakistan separate from a Hindu India, University of Chicago graduate student Martin Mitchell is awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to observe and report on the end of the British rule.  It is a heady time to be a historian assigned to follow the political impact firsthand.  Wife Evie, with toddler Billy in tow, naively joins him in this potentially dangerous and culturally dissimilar land in hopes of repairing a disintegrating marriage. 

Martin, a World War 11 veteran, returned a damaged man, haunted by memories of his horrific experiences.  His lack of ability to put the past behind him makes it impossible for him to embrace the future.  He buries himself in his academic endeavors, pushing Evie further away. He is running away and she is running toward him.  Going to India is a new beginning.

The university settles in them in a century-old bungalow in Masoorla, a comparatively safe area to set up house.  It is unique in that it has an indoor kitchen, an anomaly in that area.  Evie attempts to clean it lamenting:  “I couldn’t fix our insides, so I fixed our outside.”  As she scrubs a way, she finds a loosened brick, and hidden within the wall finds a cache of letters dating back almost a century.  As she reads them she is drawn into the lives of Felicity Chadwick and Adela Winfield, childhood friends who escape the mores of Victorian England by creating an expatriate life in India.  She becomes obsessed with their past and sets out to fill in the blanks.  As she doggedly investigates their unconventional lives, she begins to learn a bit about herself.

I found myself lost in "The Sandalwood Tree," not wanting this book to end. I loved reading its interweaving stories of the post-war and Victorian times.  It is rich with images of India, complex in both its beauty and poverty.  The descriptions of colorful stalls and aromatic food in the bazaars are as invocative as the smell of the flowers and burning flesh of the elaborate funeral pyres.  Caste systems and religious divisions, survivors and victims of war, sexual orientation, and marriage rituals are all compassionately explored in both time periods illustrating the differences yet the sameness. 

 

.: Blog
.: FTC Disclosure