Book Review: Miss New India

Miss New India by Bharati Mukherjee

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Nineteen year old Anjali Bose lives with her lower middle class family in a small village in India. Her father’s dream is to arrange a marriage for her with a suitable boy but Anjali has bigger dreams than that. With the help of her English teacher, Anjali moves to Bangalore with the hopes of becoming a customer support specialist at a call center. She quickly learns that big-city life is not as easy and carefree as she thought it would be.

Anjali was a hard character to like. She floats through her life depending on her “award winning smile” to get her though tough situations. For some reason, the other characters are captivated by her and misread her vapidness as depth. I never quite understood why. Some of Anjali’s decisions were just downright stupid and instead of sympathizing with her, I wanted to shake her.

I enjoyed reading about how India today is quite modern in some ways, yet still very traditional in others. I wish this book would have a had a glossary because the author uses quite a few words from different languages that I didn’t know.

From what I understand, the author’s previous books have gotten very good reviews. I look forward to reading one of her older books. This particular book was just okay.

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(I received this book courtesy of the Amazon Vine program.)