How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?Visit Mansi Shah's website.
A Good Indian Girl is the perfect title for this novel and really sets the tone for the story. Coupled with the cover, which features an Indian woman with a smirk, the reader can intuit that this is going to be a story that challenges the stereotypes of what is expected of a “good Indian girl.” The story starts off with Jyoti, who is a 42-year-old woman who finds herself divorced and estranged from her parents after she was unable to conceive the child that her husband so desperately wanted. She’d given up her chef career to focus on having children, so she approaches the second half of her life having lost everything that she thought she was supposed to have at that stage of her life. With no obligations, she spends the summer in Italy with her best friend, Karishma, a fellow social outcast from their conservative Gujarati community. Through the experiences of Jyoti and Karishma—and a lot of pasta and Chianti—the story changes the narrative of what type of life a good Indian girl should have, and is grounded in the universal themes of reinventing ourselves after loss, learning to...[read on]
Q&A with Mansi Shah.
--Marshal Zeringue
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