WHERE’S THE HONOUR IN THIS?

The Good Girls: An Ordinary Killing by Sonia Faleiro, Random House, $32.95. One night in the summer of 2014, two teenagers disappeared from their homes in the village of Katra Sadatganj in Uttar Pradesh.

The next morning, India woke up to the devastating images of their dead bodies handing from a tree in a mango orchard. Who were they? What had happened to them?

Were they raped and murdered? Was it a case of honour killing?

Did they commit suicide, fearing horrific punishment? For the question the villagers asked wasn’t why the girls had taken their lives. It was how they could have not.

Weeks, then  months, pass and the speculation continues, the whispers don’t abate. If as a reader one gets desperate for a closure, imagine the plight of those trapped in that situation.

Slipping deftly behind political manoeuvring, caste systems and codes of honour in a village in north India, Sonia Faleiro returns to the scene of their short lives and tragic deaths and asks, what is the human cost of shame?

She gives them new names – Padma and Lalli – because Indian law requires that the identity of victims of certain crimes remain private.

Repeated botched investigations, corrupt and self-serving politicians jockeying for photo ops with the victims’ families, inept and corrupt cops, and caught in all this, villagers who don’t know whom to trust.

Faleiro quotes Nobel laureate Kailash Satyarthi who said one child goes missing in the country every eight minutes. And economist Abhijit Bannerjee, another Nobel laureate, who said “parents may be reluctant to report children who ran away as a result of abuse, sexual and otherwise”.

He added that this was likely “rampant”. In fact, some parents sold their children or deliberately allowed unwanted daughters to stray in busy marketplaces. No one reported them missing, and so, no one looked for them.

Faleiro sets the chilling tale against a bucolic backdrop. Women cooking and cleaning, their entire lives spent in the inner courtyards except visits to the field necessitated by the absence of toilets. Men lolling on charpais outside. Kids playing among and climbing mango trees. The same trees from one of which the girls would be found hanging.

Justice delayed is justice denied, goes the saying, repeated to the point of having become trite. But like Padma and Lalli, thousands upon thousands of girls are denied justice, along with basic rights to almost everything else.

As a reporter for a popular television channel thinks, his boss could not care less about this.

The thing about India, he would say, was that there were a lot of people. And this was an ordinary killing, just two girls in some village.

But it was not. And their story will haunt you long after you’ve come to the last page of their tragic story. Specially when you read that soon after this, another girl was found hanging from a tree.

CUTTING EDGE

How To Pronounce Knife by Souvankham Thammavongsa, McClelland & Stewart, 24.95. In her debut book of fiction, Souvankham Thammavongsa introduces readers to a diverse cast of characters struggling to find their bearings in unfamiliar territory.

A young man painting nails at a local salon. A woman plucking feathers at a chicken processing plant. A father who packs furniture to move into homes he’ll never afford. A mother who works nights alongside her daughter, harvesting worms. A housewife learning English from daytime soap operas.

In the moving title story, How To Pronounce Knife, a little girl’s unconditional love for her father transcends the challenges of a new language. In the class photo, she’s the only one not dressed for the occasion. She didn’t want to lie, but there was no point in embarrassing her parents.

There insightful observations from the young author. Old is a thing that happens on the outside.

There’s so much sorrow, heartbreak, longing, that you begin to wonder if there are any bright moments in immigrant lives. And then you come upon the delightful Chick-a-Chee! in which a father tutors his kids to go door-to-door on a certain night in the year and say, “Chick-a-Chee!” in exchange for treats.

Souvankham Thammavongsa won the 2020 Scotiabank Giller Prize for this collection of short stories that will make you cry, laugh out loud and experience every emotion in between while journeying with immigrants in their new lives in Canada.

SMALL TALK

This Just Speaks To Me by Hoda Kotb, GP Putnam’s Sons, $32. Hoda Kotb follows up the much-loved I Really Needed This Today with another collection of 365 new quotes and stories to inspire.

“Every time a child is born, the world is renewed in innocence,” is followed by a little story about country music superstar Carrie Underwood’s four-year-old who described his mom as 70 years old and very good at folding laundry.

Everyone needs a friend who will call and say, “Get dressed, we’re going on an adventure.” In spring 2020, that adventure was searching for toilet paper.

Stop shrinking yourself to fit places you’ve outgrown. For all the I-wish-I-had-done-this-a-long-time-ago moments.

With quotes from also Kailash Satyarthi, Mahatma Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore, this is a great collection that applies to many of life’s situations.

HE’S BACK!

A Time for Mercy by John Grisham, Random House, $42. Jake Brigance is back! The hero of A Time To Kill, one of the most popular novels of our time, returns in Grisham’s latest offering A Time for Mercy.

There’s a time to kill.

And there’s a time for justice and mercy. So we return to Clanton, Mississippi. The year is 1990. And Brigance finds himself embroiled in a deeply divisive trial.

He’s the court-appointed attorney for a timid 16-year-old boy accused of killing a local policeman.

Many in Clanton want a swift trial and the death penalty, but Brigance digs in and discovers that there is more to the story than meets the eye.

It’s a page-turner, but the pace is of a meandering river with swift currents beneath the surface. And this makes for a surprising turn of events while Grisham holds a mirror to the American society.

Grisham’s diehard fans, used as they are to a diet of a new title from the author every year, could be forgiven for believing that he churns out novels in a factory-like fashion. This belief is so prevalent that several thought the character of the popular novelist Kelvin Kranz in the Meryl Streep-starrer Let Them All Talk was based on him.

They would be wrong.

As Grisham reveals at the end of the book, he began A Time To Kill in 1984 and published it in 1989.

AS LUCK WOULD HAVE IT

Lucky Boy by Shanthi Sekaran, G P Putnam’s Sons, $36. Eighteen-year-old Salimar Castro Valdez embarks on a perilous journey across the US-Mexico border and weeks later arrives on her cousin’s doorstep in California, dazed, and pregnant.

Kavya Reddy has created a beautiful life in her California bungalow, filled with the pleasures of work and marriage. But when the desire for a child descends on her like a cyclone and she finds she can’t conceive, her life seems empty.

When Salimar’s son is placed in an immigrant detention centre and comes under Kavya’s care, she finds her heart wrapped around another woman’s child.

A gripping novel about two women, two possible futures and one boy that illuminates life’s brutality as well as its beauty, the story is also one that one imagines playing out in real life in Trump’s America in the not-too-distant past.

LAST STRAW

The Last Straw by Zoe Matthiessen, North Atlantic Books, $23.95. Sippy, the world’s last plastic straw worries about what will happen to him when he realizes he can’t be recycled.

He meets a cardinal whose nest is made of discarded plastic, a raccoon whose neck is stuck in an old six-pack ring, and other creatures who are all struggling with plastic trash.

A great way to raise eco-awareness in young readers this Earth Day!

TEEN REVIEW

By MAHAK MISHRA

A Silent Voice by Yoshitoki Oima, Kodansha Comics, Series Box Set $93.93. Yoshitoki Oima’s A Silent Voice graphic novel series leaves you in awe after you finish reading all the seven volumes.

The book revolves around a bully named Shoyo. When a new girl, Shoko, moves to his elementary school, she becomes his main target. Six years after she leaves school, they meet again; both changed completely.

We know that bullying is wrong under all circumstances, but one can’t help but feel sorry for Shoyo and the pain that he’s going through. He doesn’t want to hurt her, but to “fight boredom”. He and his friends indulge in strange, potentially dangerous acts for the sake of “winning a fight against boredom”. This phrase is repeated over and over, and somehow, through his words, it makes sense.

I think the author was trying to bring light to the fact that we all have underlying issues. Some struggle alone, like Shoko, and some let their emotions out.

In one of my favourite scenes, Shoyo is crying  and alone. He walked around visibly “crossing out” everyone around him. It held immense power .

I recommend this for anyone and everyone who enjoys manga and literature.

• Mahak Mishra is a youth volunteer at Brampton Library.