Meet Me in Mumbai

 Meet Me in Mumbai by Sabina Khan, 352 pages.

This book is written in two acts. The first follows Ayesha, who is completing her last year of high school in America, far from her family in Mumbai. In a whirlwind few months she falls in love, gets pregnant, and finds herself alone and making the most difficult decision of her life. After much agonizing she decides to give the baby up for adoption to preserve both her own reputation and that of her family, and after even more agonizing she chooses to return to Mumbai.

Eighteen years later her daughter, Mira Fuller-Jensen, is feeling increasing tension between her Indian heritage and the white Texas culture that she's been raised in. When she finds a letter from her birth mother asking her to meet her in a certain place in Mumbai on her eighteenth birthday (a few short months away) she is determined to meet her, and hopes desperately this might finally help her figure out who she really is. 

I found the first half of this book very emotionally compelling, and I was deeply invested in Ayesha. Which made it pretty disappointing when I couldn't say the same about the second half, especially since that was the part of the story I was expecting to be more interested in. Too much of Mira's story tonally read more like an after school special about understanding other people, and I found the emotional drive to be pretty flat. It's also interesting that meeting her parents did in face lead to self-understanding, which was a shallow enough development I had a hard time buying it. Overall I would still say this is a fine book, but I enjoyed the author's The Love and Lies of Rukshana Ali much more.

The Making of Her

The Making of Her by Bernadette Jiwa (2022) 336 pages

Joan lives in Dublin with her husband Martin and his very difficult mother, Molly. The year is 1996, and Joan finds herself still grieving for the daughter they gave up for adoption 30 years ago, before they were married. They went on to marry and have another daughter, Carmel. Although Joan puts up a front, her depression over Martin's insistence that they give up the baby continues all these years later, affecting her relationships with both her husband and their younger daughter. Martin had insisted that no one be told the secret about their first child, who was born in London, away from their hometown.

When Joan and Martin receive a letter from their first daughter, Martin is uninterested in meeting with her, afraid that her existence will hurt his reputation in the business community. Joan meets with the daughter, Emma, and learns what crisis has caused Emma to contact them after all of this time.

The book's title, The Making of Her, could be used to describe Joan, Emma, or Carmel. The story is a powerful reminder of women's issues and many of the nuanced emotions related to adoption and motherhood.

The Two of Us

The Two of Us by Andy Jones (2015) 326 pages

William Fisher and Ivy Lee had a love affair. They'd hardly known each other before everything changed with their pregnancy. The story, told from Fisher's point of view, follows the relationship from a mostly sexual one, to that of prospective parents of twins. Fisher's job producing television commercials isn't exactly fulfilling, but he's motivated to keep the money coming in, even if it's from selling toilet paper or tampons, to help prepare for his babies. He often wonders why Ivy had indicated that contraceptives weren't needed, but he can't bring himself to ask her about it; the timing is never right.

Preparing to parent together when one doesn't really know one's partner proves to be a challenge, a challenge made trickier when Ivy's bear of a brother comes to stay in their small flat for a time. Indeed, there's a whole cast of characters who are believable, and Fisher's point of view is spot-on, vacillating between his foibles and annoyances and his deeper, more thoughtful times.

The story is written by a Brit and set in England; the British terms are endearing.