If you haven’t gotten a can of coffee from a Taiwanese 7-11, you’re missing out, I love these sweet coffeedrinks, and they taste like my winter teaching in Taipei, too. Also, I was reading Honor on our road-trip vacation, and part of my vacation indulgence was a bunch of Taiwanese canned coffees. Smita has a lot of complicated emotions around her return, and the details of taste, sounds, smells, and little familiar customs in the city helped to bring this to life. I loved the sensory details in Smita’s return to India. Although Smita has already successfully covered dark and upsetting gender stories around the world, this unfinished story of an honor killing in a small village will open up parts of her past and cause her to re-examine basically everything. She thinks she’s going back to help a friend and fellow journalist recover from an injury, but really her friend Shannon wants Smita to finish covering her story while she recovers in the hospital. (Jan.In Honor, by Thrity Umrigar, an Indian-American journalist, Smita, returns to India after many, many years away. Umrigar offers readers a broad understanding of the complicated issues at play in contemporary India, but the story fails to do the subject justice. Their propulsive stories and well-developed characterizations, however, don’t quite compensate for the flat, even cartoonish, supporting characters, or for a romantic subplot involving Smita and a man she meets while reporting on the story, which reads like an afterthought.

Both Meena’s recollections and Smita’s narrative contain moments of emotional clarity and terror. Speaking with Meena also forces Smita to confront long-hidden facets of her own past. Meena’s story both reinforces and complicates Smita’s preconceptions about India’s gender dynamics, religious divisions, and caste hierarchies. A young Hindu mother, Meena Mustafa, has accused her two brothers of killing her Muslim husband in a fire that also left Meena badly scarred.

But when a colleague is badly injured while reporting on a murder trial that overlaps with Smita’s gender issues beat, Smita takes over the assignment. Despite traveling the world as a foreign correspondent, Smita Agarwal has not returned to India, the land of her birth, since her family left for Ohio when she was a teenager. Umrigar ( Everybody’s Son) returns to themes of India’s evolution and the transformative potential of women’s relationships in her uneven latest.

Honor umrigar review