Author: Padma Venkatraman
Publisher: Penguin
Rating: worthy!
DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review.
Erratum:
p194 "souls progress" should be "soul's progress"
I used to know someone whose name (both names, actually!) sounded very much like Padma's last name, though I suppose such a name is relatively common in a nation of over a billion people (so I don't imagine they're related!). So what about what she wrote? Well, despite some sad tropes and clichés in this novel, I really did enjoy it; however, my undertaking with this blog is to give honest reviews that pull no punches even for novels that I recommend, so brace yourself! Amongst the good, lies some tough fiber!
You might think that this story - the shattered artist - has been done before (and it always seems to be about dancers, doesn't it?!). I don't doubt that it has, but the real question you need to ask here is: has it been done so refreshingly well, and was it so beautifully written? Discuss! In my opinion, it wasn't: this novel is the standard, not what may have gone before.
This novel is what Born Confused could have been but which failed to get there. Unlike that novel, this one is set in India, in Chennai (which you may know as Madras, home of the hotter-than-hell curry). Chennai is the home-base of the Tamil film industry, and a center of Bharatanatyam dance, so it's no surprise that this novel is about a young girl named Veda whose greatest passion in life is that very dance form (examples can be found on You Tube). Her whole focus, as we join the narrative, is on preparing for a dance competition, which she wins. Right at that moment, as she's flying so high, the vehicle in which she's riding home flies into a tree, and she awakens in a hospital to find part of her right leg is missing.
A Time To Dance is written like a poem, and it works. Sometimes it's a bit awkward because the line breaks come where I wasn't expecting them, but most of the time they come exactly where they ought to be. Okay, maybe they always come exactly where they ought to be, and I'm just clueless! Fine! I'll deal, but one place where it worked less than ideally for me was around page ninety-one, where there was a long conversation. That seemed quite artificial (that is, the line breaks, not the conversation).
Hey, the Bharatiya Janata Party just won a majority in the Indian general election, so maybe Bharat is in now! I have no idea what I'm talking about, do I?!
On the other hand, there was a (shorter) conversation later which scanned much better, so maybe it was having so many single lines on a page which looked so odd. Other than that, I was pleasantly surprised at how well it did work. Venkatraman is evidently a very talented writer and knows her poetry even when it's disguised as prose (or vice-versa). Some of the lines read like haiku.
Veda (no word yet on whether the prefix is Darth...) meets an American doctor who insists that she call him Jim. He's working to provide Indians with limb prostheses, and he takes a cast of her leg and tells her that he will have her dancing again. Veda all but falls in love with him which struck me as a bit too much, especially since he has to be considerably older than Veda is. We're not actually told how old Veda is, but this novel is for ages 12 and up, and Jim is around 30.
Yes, I know there are May-December relationships and there's nothing wrong with them, but one does not find such relationships in YA novels; then again, one does not find very many Indian-authored YA novels widely available in the USA. Maybe there's a less blinkered ethos in India when it comes to relationships?
Veda notes that while, during her time in the hospital, her rival Kamini came to see her and even brought flowers, her teacher Uday failed to show up, and when she goes to see him wearing her temporary prosthesis, and demonstrates that she can still do the moves, he reminds her that there's one important Bharatanatyam dance move which she has failed to make, and when she attempts it, she can't do it. He then makes his move: turning his back upon her.
Angry, Veda seeks a new teacher, Dhanam, who takes her on, but she must start in the beginner's class until she finds her feet (so to speak). That class is taught by Govinda, so now she has the hots for two males in her life, both of whom are older than herself. I have to confess at this point that I would have liked Veda better had she been a little more mature - not older, necessarily, but more mature.
It felt wrong to me that she so easily fell for two guys in a row when she was supposedly so devoted to dancing. That's not to say, of course, that a girl can't multi-task(!), but it betrayed the devotion and focus which she'd had in the early part of the novel. To me it felt like she had not only lost part of a limb, but also lost her drive, which would be a far more devastating loss in my opinion. Deva stating - get it? See, Padma V., I can pun, too!
Talking of trope, Govinda has gold flecks in his eyes. Is it not in any way, shape, or form, possible to have a main YA male character who doesn't have gold flecks in his freaking eyes? Is it illegal to have non-gold-flecked eyes in a male love interest YA fiction?! I'm so tired of reading that! Are there no YA writers who can come up with something original in this regard? Where are the editors to tut-tut when their writers put something like this on the page?! OK, pet peeve off, moving on....
One thing which struck me as odd was the cruel puns made by a set of twins at Veda's school, who kept joking about her amputation. The problem is not that they were being cruel: people can be cruel in real life, whether intentionally or not, and it would be foolish to chide a novelist for portraying realistic characters even if you don't like the character. No, it was the puns which made me think, "Really?". Plus, a lot of these puns were tied to the game of cricket, which will be well-received in British ears, but which will fall flat for a US audience.
Puns were made on words like 'limp' and on cricket terms such as 'stump' and 'match' (Veda played cricket before her injury), but this is purportedly taking place in a part of India where they're presumably speaking Tamil. )That's just a guess! The language isn't specified.) I couldn't help but wonder if the puns would work in a different language. Since cricket was 'exported' to India by the Brits, perhaps the words for 'match' and 'stump' are actually the same, but is the word for 'stump', in reference to the remainder of an amputated limb the same in Tamil or Hindi? I doubt it.
Is the word for 'match', meaning a fortuitous pairing of two people the same as 'match' meaning a game, in these languages? Maybe we're supposed to overlook things like this, but I can't completely ignore it! It jumps out at me, even as I'm frankly quite amused by the puns. Padma Venkatraman would probably be an entertaining conversationalist. Fortunately, this language-specific punning isn't a killer with regard to my rating this novel! Not for me, it isn't at any, er, rate....
I have to say that Veda's friend Chandra's comparison of Karma with Newton's third law of motion doesn't work! In Newton's law, actions have equal but opposite reactions (strictly speaking, an object upon which a force is exerted will present a force equal in magnitude and opposite in direction to the force acting upon it), whereas in karma, actions are supposed to have similar reactions, not opposite ones, aren't they?!
But enough quibbling! This is, despite my griping above, a really good and entertaining novel, and it was a pleasure to read it. I recommend it without reservation.
