REVIEW: Sunshine and Spice by Aurora Palit
Dear Aurora Palit,
Naomi Kelly was born to Bengali parents in Canada. Her biological father abandoned her mother, Supriya – aka “Sue” and Sue then left her own parents and rejected the South Asian community altogether. Sue subsequently married a wonderful Canadian man who was a loving and engaged father to Naomi. However, Naomi has been largely disconnected from her Bengali heritage and culture for her entire life. She didn’t feel she fit in with the mostly Caucasian students at her schools in Alberta and now that she’s in Kelowna to build her brand marketing business, she is painfully aware she doesn’t fit in with the local South Asian community either.
Naomi is very much in the early stages of building her business. She wants to specialise in the smaller “mum and dad” type stores in the neighbourhood rather than larger corporations. She has an opportunity to win the job to re-envision Gia’s Bazaar, and is up against her rival from the British Columbia Institute of Technology’s marketing management program, Cynthia Kumar, whom she describes thus:
So persistent was she in reminding her classmates of her guaranteed success in the industry, she might as well have lifted her leg and marked her territory on every South Asian business owner in watering distance.
And here she was in Gia’s Bazaar, undoubtedly with a bladder full of entitlement.
I had to admire the analogy. LOL
Gia Mukherjee is a fairly recent widow, the mother of three sons. The middle son, Dev, moved in to help Gia after the death of her husband. He was initially working at his corporate CPA job remotely but he quit because he hated it. He hasn’t told Gia yet.
Dev feels very strongly the weight of cultural expectation and resists its bonds. He is appalled when he finds out that Gia has retained a matchmaker to find him a bride. He’s not sure he wants to marry at all and he’s very much less than impressed at the concept of an arranged marriage. He wants something else from a relationship than his mother wants for him. His previous girlfriends have not been culturally acceptable and he’s never introduced any of them to his family. They’ve basically been secret relationships as far as his family is concerned and fairly short term.
Naomi wins the job at Gia’s but feels out of her depth with the remodel. She and Dev make a deal; she will help deflect potential matches from his orbit (which quickly becomes a fake relationship which eventually becomes a real one, albeit hidden from his family) and he will help her navigate the Bengali culture she wants to incorporate into the new Gia’s.
I am a white person who is white and, while I have an understanding that there are cultural differences in various communities, it is not my lived experience. So I’m very poorly qualified to comment on any of the cultural issues raised in the book. I understood Naomi wanted to be connected to her Bengali heritage and felt excluded from what ought to be her own community. I understood that Dev wanted to have a little more freedom in his life than the strictures expected of him by his mother and aunties. But my understanding is very much that of an outsider looking in. I expect first generation immigrant readers (whether of Indian heritage or not) will relate much better to these aspects of the novel.
I admit I didn’t quite understand why Naomi kept her Bengali heritage from those in the Kelowna South Asian community. One one level, Naomi particularly did not want Gia to know just how little she knew of Bengali customs and practices but on the other, it was obvious she didn’t know much of the culture and she outright said it as well. So I had a bit of a disconnect with the messaging at times. Why Naomi couldn’t tell Dev was also a bit of a mystery to me.
Dev is a bit of a grump and Naomi is more gregarious (without being “sunshine” as such) and her initial attraction to him confused me a little (apart from the physical) as he wasn’t very nice to her at all. Later in the book, Dev does not support her when he really needed to and I had some resentment about that for longer than Naomi did.
For all that Dev had his own challenges with the community he was raised in, I did not see him working through his issues with it nearly as much as I saw Naomi learning about and embracing her heritage. I’d have liked to have a little more about how Dev navigated the changes he wanted to make in his life. From the epilogue, it was obvious that some changes were in fact made, but it was also apparent that in other ways he was merely continuing to go along to get along and hide things he thought his mother and aunties may not have understood. I’d have liked to have a little more insight into Gia and her feelings about Naomi. Perhaps that is more on me and being super white though and/or not being great with subtext.
I was happy to read a book which featured a culture not my own and to look up words I was unfamiliar with and refresh my memory of things I knew a little about. The setting was the most attractive thing to me about the book. Ultimately though, I was not entirely sold on the relationship between Dev and Naomi and so my final impression of Sunshine and Spice was pretty mixed.
Grade: B-/C+
Regards,
Kaetrin
