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.