"Reality is just like a giant onion

with infinite layers of peels

and you, my loves, can choose any that appeals!"

I emerged with this nugget

And laid it before my kids.

Excited, no time wasted, they chose theirs

Do away with school 'n ensnare

digitally-encrusted career-parents to 
a magical day at Wonderla!

So off we went

For they’d waited day and night

Checked heights and cried

To qualify for the dizzy drop zone

And the giant roller-coaster ride.

And they made it at last.

Jubilant, swooning at dizzy heights and

In and out of spinning teacups and majestic white elephants

Waving excitedly as we occasionally aligned

Under the scarlet sun.

Licking at our ice cream melts 

I misted. 

How easy it was

To mend broken promises 

Simple desires  

To fill tiny cups with happiness.

And yet, when they were out there 

Strapped in towering metallic seats 

I fretted about their choices 

For tiny fireflies they'd become

Hurtling about

in a giant fire-breathing dragon coaster

Its ups and its downs

The sheer largeness of the world around

Flashing before me like a movie reel

I watched in a trance

They rode and rode

Into lights and shadows

And realms unseen

When the roller-coaster made its final turn

And disappeared somewhere into the horizon

Dreamlike crowds kept streaming toward me

And suddenly I'm ambushed again

By two little faces giddy-ed with happiness:

"Can we try this ride again??" they clamor. 

And it brings to me familiar relief.

I know then that they’ll be okay.

This life. All theirs to ride.

This childhood. Their precious possession.

Those Pesky Crows!

At an unearthly hour, when the waning moon stopped casting its faint light through the windows and the cicadas ceased their endless hum, I woke up. The air held a silence so big that my ears perked when it heard a distinctive rustling sound. I knew then that it was her, stirring slowly from her bed in the next room. I dragged the blanket towards my face, covering myself like a cocoon, and lay in wait for her nocturnal excursion to my bedroom.
 
The faint chants of the prayer she was mumbling bore through my ears like the buzz of a bumble bee, a buzz that grew progressively louder until I knew she was in my room.

“When is my turn?” she whispered, “When are you taking me?”

I could imagine spit flying as she mouthed these words. Even with my eyes closed, I knew that she would stand still for a few moments, surveying me from a distance. A dozen hues scribbled mindlessly on the black canvas of my closed eyes, making me conscious of a dreary, unknown world that existed within my own head. Be brave, I chided myself, but curled up all the more. After what seemed like eons, I heard her shuffling back to her room, dragging her feet along behind the walking stick. Only then did I relax, allowing sleep to draw me back into its comforting cave.

When the day broke, I checked on her in her room, but my octogenarian mother-in-law did not exhibit any recollection of the previous night. She only voiced her perpetual aggravation that her bed sheet stank of urine.

“This room is stinking like a doghouse. Take this away…useless girl!” she mumbled as she flipped the bed sheet over with a jerk of her walking stick. This was her manner, barking orders to mask the ignominy of having to depend on me.

I washed the bed sheet and spread it out on the frayed coir clothesline that I had secured between the two mango trees in the courtyard. The trees were abloom with tiny mango flowers, the tender blossoms weighted down with dew. Transfixed, I sat under the tree for a while braiding my lengthy hair, my body lulled by the early morning sun and my heart brimming at the pristine beauty of the blossoms.

In no time, I rushed indoors as I heard her call out to me to get her bath ready. The rancid odour from the toilet bowl made it impossible to stand in the bathroom for more than a second, so I splashed an ounce of phenol to snuff out the smell. Once that was done, my mother-in-law would undress and sit on an elevated platform in the corner, impassive to my hardened hands as I oiled her and rubbed soap and poured hot water over her body.

Afterwards, while I bustled through the kitchen, skinning the fish and roasting it in the brick oven, she would sit in her unlit room and try to write in an old diary. But her hands shook so much that she could barely manage a line after hours of braving the tremors. Defeated, she would stare vacantly at the dancing motes of dust lit up by the beam of sunlight streaming in through the window. It was as if she was waiting for time to cease, or, I figured, waiting for darkness of the night so that sleep would blot out the reality of the day.
                                                  ***

The day her son married me, she had wept out aloud, slumping into a heap in the corner of the room, her bloodshot eyes occasionally shooting daggers at me. She detested my long cascading hair and almond-eyes, the weapons, she alleged, I had used to ensnare her son into lovelorn ignorance. He had completely disregarded her pleas to leave me on account of my unsuitability, for I was considered by the villagers to be an augury of ill-fate. The time of my birth had made me a victim of a singularly infelicitous planetary placement; so ominous was I that my marital family was supposedly doomed from the day I entered their lives.

The tiny horoscope book containing my birth chart was in tatters, having been passed around for numerous consultations. Every single astrologer had ruled that I was beyond rescue, that I was as much bad news as the dark and violent thunderstorms that my birth month heralded.  The day I was born, my own mother wept, something she continued doing throughout my growing years, ruing: My dear child, who will marry you?

My mother-in-law did not cry when her son, my husband, died. On a chilly night before our first wedding anniversary, he came home inebriated, after a reckless soiree at the local toddy shop, throwing up continuously until he collapsed. Later, we learnt that the toddy was adulterated. My mother-in-law wandered like a lost sheep through the days and nights that followed, not knowing how to grieve. I removed myself to my room, sobbing, guilty as hell, unable to face the world, cowering while the muffled voices in the other room discussed the verdict of the cowrie shells on the astrologer’s chart. The obvious problem plaguing the family, the root of all adversity, was me.

The relatives went away, one by one, finally leaving just the two of us in the house. And it was on one of the nights that followed that she began her excursions to my room. Sometimes she asked: “Is he here yet? Is he here for me?”

She was turning more and more delirious; apparently she thought she could catch me in the dead of the night, conferring with Yama, the God of Death himself, the two of us plotting her death. She thought it was her turn next.

***

On silent summer afternoons, ripe mangoes thudded down from the trees, swarming the courtyard, but she just looked away. The mangoes looked so juicy, I felt a cavernous craving for them, but when I peeled one and offered her a slice, she threw a fit. Their yellow sugariness was a reminder of happier times, she hissed, the tree was a synonym of her son, having been planted when he was born. She had expected him to thrive, like the tree. She forbade me from picking up the fallen fruits, letting them turn putrid so as to ground her in her sorrow. I realized that she was slowly submitting to the call of her own death, as yielding as the rotting mangoes on the ground that let slender worms burrow and gnaw and claim every bit of their juice.
                                              ***

The next summer, just when the green mangoes matured into yellow ripeness, my mother-in-law passed away. Three days crawled by, and it was the time for the most important post-funeral ceremony - feeding the departed soul. A clutch of relatives and passers-by from the village assembled in the courtyard, waiting for the spectacle to unfold. I ferried an array of sadya dishes from the kitchen to the courtyard for the ceremony. The priest then placed a banana leaf in the centre of the courtyard and spooned all the dishes onto it. Soon the leaf was replete with food, each dish carefully positioned in its rightful place. As he started intoning mantras in a continuous loop, the priest crouched on the ground several steps away and clapped his hands vigorously. That was a gesture to invite the departed soul to materialize from the otherworld and partake in the sadya I had made ready.

I looked up towards the sky for any indication of crows – a cluster of black specks that would spot the feast out of nowhere and come gliding down to swoop up morsels. Crows, who, still disbelieving their luck at this invitation, would raise a cacophony with their shrill crowing whilst fending each other off with their beaks and wings. I always delighted in this part of the funeral ceremony. There was something peculiar, a camaraderie I shared with crows; I considered myself their veritable personification. Why, folks always took offense at our presence. Nobody ever hesitated to shun us as bad omens; we were, as a rule, cussed at, or shooed away.

But today, those abominable ravens were going to be venerated and fed, elevated to a divine rank, for one among them was the bearer of a soul, my mother-in-law’s soul. These crows must be altruists, I thought; for how else can we explain their magnanimity to house the souls of folks who had once tried to stone them? Crows must surely be a forgiving lot, like me.
 "Which of these did she love the most? Avial? Puli inji?” the priest asked me, pointing to the assortment of dishes.

“Pappadam,” I said, as I recalled her fondness for the crisps. I pictured a loner crow among the crowd of crows, who would lay a claim only on the pappadam. That would be my mother-in-law, coming to eat the last meal that I would prepare for her in this lifetime.

We crouched in wait near the sadya, feeling increasingly pensive as minutes crawled by. The sky was clear and the noon sun was unduly harsh. But there were no crows in sight! Ordinarily, the crows would materialize out of nowhere for even the tiniest scraps of leftovers. But today, there was not even a trace of them!

Folks were tired by now, and as they sidled about, wiping the sweat trickling down their faces, they began exchanging meaningful glances.
They whispered:
“Where have all the crows disappeared today?”
“Is this an omen?”
“Surely, some otherworldly intervention… how else can you explain the absence of crows?”
“You mean... this is the mother-in-law’s revenge?”
“Ha..seems so. The poor old woman was dreading her end right from the day this girl came into her son’s life.”
“Hush! I feel sorry for the girl though, to be the bearer of a wretched fate!”

And though I’ve heard them a thousand times over, these insinuations were still as mutilating as a stream of arrows. In spite of my resistance, tears filled my eyes as if they had a will of their own, slowly blurring the crowd into oblivion, and reducing their chatter to vagueness. For endless moments, all I could discern was a clear sky, and a forsaken feast.

The commotion was getting louder. Little children were cupping their mouths with their palms, hollering - caw, caw! mimicking crows. Assorted women were making a racket with rumbling hand-claps. Look over there, look, look; they started nudging me. As I looked across the courtyard, I saw, on the clothesline between the mango trees, a solitary crow. Dropping all my restraint, I grabbed a pappadam and sprinted towards it, waving the pappadam with all the earnestness of a mother encouraging her toddler to eat, as if the appeasement of this crow alone would evaporate all the miseries that had amassed in my life.

But the crow, perhaps frightened by the clamour, perhaps stubborn, winged towards the higher branches of the mango tree instead. With its curvy talons perched on a branch, the crow started pecking greedily at a ripe mango for the longest time, as if the sweet rush satiated some elusive, long-forgotten, happiness.

“Is this an omen” - the crowd began to whisper with wonder as they watched, rapt - “unspoken tidings....a new beginning?”

As if to deepen the mystique, the crow flew away in a flash, in the same unexpected manner that marked its arrival.

I suddenly found my knees wobbly. Oblivious to the crowd and their deliberation of this unusual omen, I slid down to the ground under the mango tree, rubbing my numb feet. Lost in various thoughts of my own, I reached for a fallen mango, stroking it, pressing it, bruising it, until its tingling scent rose sharply in my nose. The scent made me giddy, flooding me with memories of cravings that I had long avoided, and suddenly, it was no longer possible for me to resist the sweetness of its yellow innards.
 ----------------------                                                

sadya = a feast
pappadam = a thin, crispy cracker
avial = medley of vegetables cooked in yoghurt
puli-inji = ginger chutney
========================================
Published in: Reading Hour Magazine

Lucid💫

I once looked in a mirror 
and everything changed
my eyes turned translucent
the green of gorgeous oceans
and in the space around me
bright tetrahedrons sparkled and disappeared
I thanked my angels
for this gift
of lifting the great veil
and bringing to me mystic shapes and sights
hidden from plain life
and when I turned around, more joy!
I found I was floating
light and free all the way to the balcony
laughing, I tumbled out into the blue skies
in full control sans wings
above rooftops and treetops, I soared
breathing in the headiness
of magical possibilities and options galore
I could be what I wanted and be where I wanted!
but then my heart fluttered
and I knew it even before I knew it,
where I was headed next. 
along I flew then, heart-guided 
to give my beloved
a grand flying visit. ---
oh it startles me how,
even when I’m lucid,
my devotion to you stays true.
💫✨💟 

Please Look After Mom by Kyung-Sook Shin

"IT’S BEEN ONE WEEK since Mom went missing."

This opening line, intriguing as it is, is also an announcement of an emotionally-fraught journey that awaits the reader and the gamut of possible arcs that this journey could take. Stunned by the possibilities, you wonder if this would be just another novel that promises the moon but crash lands with an insipid ending. After all, the success of this book would depend on whether the author does justice to the prospect of handling the missing mom. But once you yield to the allure of that first line, the narrative folds you in itself, revealing layer after complex layer of the intense human story, convincing you that the plot has indeed taken the best possible arc from start to finish.

Please Look After Mom captures the dynamics of a South Korean family scalded by steaming hot guilt in the wake of their mother's mysterious disappearance. Park Son-yo, a sixty-seven year old mother-of-five, disappears from a busy Seoul station while on her way to visit her children. An unaccountable grief accumulates in the family with the physical absence of the mother, drifting them into an infinite loop of remorse. The novel tackles the guilt that plagues the ethereal relationship between a mother and her children, and the various emotions that are unplugged in the family as they frantically try to find her. Four unique voices put together the story of the mother's life - that of a daughter, a son, the father, and then the mother herself.

The disappearance of the mother here is also a figurative representation of a mother's absence from the everyday lives of her busy grown-up children. The author explores the idea that mothers can be the most obscure beings, never understood, taken for granted by her children and husband. "Speaking at a symbolic level, many mothers of our generation, I believe, have gone missing or remain neglected,"  says the author in an interview,  "What we know about our mothers doesn’t always tell the whole story of who they are."

Kyung-Sook Shin's choice of telling this story through multiple perspectives lends a thoroughness to the plot, and the story comes a full circle in the portrayal of the missing mother's voice. The children spend an eternity believing in their own perspective about their family, without realizing how starkly different the perspective of a sibling or parent could be. As it happens, people can go through their entire life convinced that their mother favors another sibling over them; this ignominy might agonize them no end as a child and shape their behavior as an adult, but in their mother's heart might reside an entirely different way of looking at things. By writing the mother's point of view, the author exposes the folly of relying on just a single perspective to look at things. Guilt indeed goes two ways, flying back and forth between a mother and her child, in futility, both regretting things said or unsaid, the things done or not done. 

"Did Mom know? That I, too, needed her my entire life?" 

Not only is this novel transportitive, but it also speaks directly to you, across cultures, as an intense personal experience, igniting a yearning for your own mother. Every page feels like a portrayal of the maternal figures you have known up-close. Even the cultural aspect isn't alien; their tradition of ancestral rites, and the concept of rebirth as a bird, has unearthly similarity to the shraddha rituals followed in certain sects in India.

It is hard to make out that this is a work of translation; the narrative flows smoothly and there is not a word out of place. Even the Epilogue - which is usually a halfhearted scramble to tie up the loose threads of the story - reflects the dedication with which it has been conceived and written. Cathartic as it is for the daughter, it is an ideal closure for the reader as well.

This book is worth reading and re-reading for the rich, raw emotions that it strokes.

Kyung-sook Shin (born 1963) is one of South Korea’s most widely read and acclaimed novelists. She has been honored with the Manhae Literature Prize, the Dong-in Literature Prize, and the Yi Sang Literary Prize, as well as France’s Prix de l’Inaperçu. Please Look After Mom is her first book to be translated to English.

Small Island by Andrea Levy

There are some journeys where you can lose yourself. 

Gilbert Joseph, a black Jamaican who had volunteered to serve England as an RAF pilot in the war against Nazi Germany, realized this only when it was too late. He had set sail on a ship that brought with it a group of eager, hardworking Jamaicans to England. Jamaica, at that time, was British colony, and the humble Jamaicans considered it their allegiance to defend their 'mother country' England.

“Then one day you hear Mother calling – she is troubled, she need your help. Leave home, leave familiar, leave love. Shiver, tire, hunger – for no sacrifice is too much to see you at Mother’s needy side.”

Though England was up in arms against the atrocities of the Nazis, its own society was, at that time, steeped in an intense prejudice against people of color. It wasn't long before Gilbert and other earnest Jamaicans realized that, but for the purpose of serving lowly jobs in the war, their colored selves were very unwelcome on this white turf.

"She offers you no comfort after your journey. No smile. No welcome. Yet she looks down at you through lordly eyes and says "Who the bloody hell are you?""

Gilbert's high-flying dream of becoming an RAF pilot was quashed, and he was forced to work as a driver. His poetic lament tugs at the heartstrings, echoing the disillusionment of many others like him: "How come England did not know me?"

The inspiration for this bittersweet novel was sparked by one such journey from Jamaica to England made by the author's father. Told from four different points of view, the author weaves together a telling tale of four individuals and the troubled times that they find themselves in. 

At the other end, in Kingston, Jamaica, Hortense Roberts had enough reasons to hold her head high. She was colored a light shade of golden honey and was a teacher to boot, which automatically relegated her a cut above other soot black Jamaican women. She dreamed of going to England, the perfect abode for an accomplished lady like her, and work there as a teacher.

Now Gilbert was the anti-pole of her dream man - uncouth, unsophisticated, hardly the gentleman, with only a guileless heart as his saving grace. In a union of convenience of sorts, Hortense married Gilbert, and arrived in England. Her pipe dreams about the glory of England came crashing down as soon as she set her eyes on his ramshackle one-room home. This disillusionment made her insufferable; she patronized Gilbert and continually harangued him, but Gilbert was not one to take this lying down. Their spirited exchanges, delivered in authentic Jamaican diction, brought comic relief to the intense story.

Their landlady, the effervescent Queenie, was another narrator. She had the distinction of being the only white person in the neighborhood to rent out her rooms to black people.Though broadminded, Queenie had a diminutive knowledge of the world outside England, and thought, like several other Britons, that Jamaica was in Africa. She was married to an unromantic English bloke, Bernard, who harbored an unconcealed dislike of black people. When Queenie let out her rooms to Gilbert and some other black Jamaicans, Bernard had been missing from home for 5 years, having gone to India to support the English troops during World War 2. In this subplot, the author dwelt a tad excessively on highlighting Queenie's charitable spirit; it got to the point where I thought any more of it would be overkill.

At about three-fourths into the plot, Bernard reappeared, completely unsettling the lives of the other three characters. His late introduction made it harder to relate to his narrative because, by that time, I had already categorized him as an insignificant character in the novel. Since the plot switched among multiple first-person narratives, it took some effort to change gears and adapt to a new character's point of view.

Anyhow, I ploughed through Bernard's narrative, hoping to be rewarded with some enlightening prose of India in the 1940s, but the author had nothing new to say beyond the trite set of clichés' and stereotypes that have to be mentioned in any writing about India - cows on streets, mosquitoes, dirty railway platforms, begging urchins, open latrines, stench, body odor, garlic breath, snakes, snaky head shake. In that brief narrative, Ms. Levy had them all covered, as if she were just referring them off a list of Indian peculiarities that she had especially created for the purpose.

In a surprising development that converged all plot lines, Micheal Roberts - the mischief maker from Hortense's childhood who had teased Hortense as a child and grew up to be a skirt chaser - turned up one day at Queenie's door. The author risked too much of a coincidence here, making the plot that was flowing so organically until that moment appear synthetic and contrived. But despite this, the author had complete command over the four narratives -those of Gilbert, Horetense, Queenie, and Bernard. They worked in perfect unison, smartly propelling the story forward, not once derailing the plot. For the most part, the pacing was good, each individual narrative sharing nothing more, nothing less than what was required of the plot, while the story steadily gravitated towards the climax.

It was through Micheal that the author chose to make a beautiful statement that echoed as the motif of the book. Micheal had once sighted amongst the debris of London a multi-hued hummingbird, the national bird of Jamaica, and in that hummingbird, its red, green, yellow hues flitting against the dull gray of debris, he saw a glimpse of his native country. Like a buoy that secured a drowning man against pull of the waters, this sentiment sustained and comforted the multitudes of soldiers, refugees, and immigrants who have had to leave their homeland to live in foreign shores. As evident from the warmth that enveloped Gilbert after sighting other Jamaicans in the cold, frigid streets of London, and the succor that Bernard felt amidst fellow Englishmen in faraway Calcutta, it was this sense of deja vu, these snatches of familiarity that helped one hang on to the fading memories of their motherland even in hostile, unfriendly shores.

The novel culminates in a twist that appears cinematic at first, but upon reflection, grows on you as an intense indicator of just how much racial prejudice scars the psyche of a society.

Andrea Levy (born 1956) is a British author, born in London to Jamaican parents who sailed to England on the Empire Windrush in 1948. Levy began writing only in her mid-thirties, but she attracted attention immediately with her first novel, the semi-autobiographical Every Light in the House Burnin'. Her fourth novel, Small Island (2004) published by Picador, won the Whitbread Book of the Year award (2004), the Orange Prize for Fiction (2004), and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize (2005). It has since been made into a television drama, which was broadcast by the BBC in December 2009. (Courtesy: Wikipedia)

A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore

Author: Lorrie Moore, bio
Publisher: Random House

A Gate at the Stairs is a kaleidoscope of insightful observations on the monotones of everyday life and human foibles in the face of adversity. Set in a Midwestern town, the novel plays itself out in a chronological manner, interspersed with flashes of flashbacks, as a series of experiences that the protagonist Tassie undergoes in a particular period of time.

Tassie, an unpretentious twenty-year-old, leads a cocooned life, going through the motions of college life and a part time babysitting job, when her life is overturned and she is thrust from her haven into the real, harsh ways of the world. Involving a mysterious boyfriend, a weird employer, and a personal tragedy waiting to happen, this book is a stoic narration about a girl enduring personal turbulence, and maturing in the process.

The book, however, turns out to be more of the author’s sounding board than that of the protagonist. The author seeks to make statements on an assortment of themes like terrorism, racism, adoption, dysfunctional families, love, religion, war, and death using the protagonist as her mouthpiece. But sadly, the beauty of her message doesn’t translate through the voice of Tassie, because the plot doesn’t pull through.

Written in the first person, the author chooses to keep no secrets from her readers, and reveals too much too quickly. In the subplot about Tassie's brother Robert, it becomes apparent early on that a terrible fate awaits him. At least three instances are a dead giveaway -Tassie's brushing off her brother’s apprehensions about joining the military; the brother prematurely revealing the way he wants himself buried; and Tassie's forgetting to reply to his email. The sense of a tragedy looming becomes official in P.258: And here between us passed a look of pale apprehension, some past, some future, the details of which I couldn’t yet know, but each blasting into the room and meeting there, draining the blood from our faces. After this, it is just a wait, for when, or on which page, the brother will be killed off. It certainly robbed the plot of its tension.

The lack of suspense and credibility also plagues the subplot about her boyfriend Reynaldo. It defies logic why he‘s still dawdling in his apartment if “they” (cops?) have marked him a jihadi suspect. Tassie's launching into a tirade against jihad is a bit out-of-character, given that she has been portrayed as a meek, non-confrontational person; evidently, here the protagonist functions as the author’s mouthpiece. That the boyfriend listens to her spiel and proffers explanation is even more unexpected. The exchange of words between them at this point is poorly narrated; it comes through as artificial and unconvincing. There are a host of other unresolved questions in this subplot - the scene about her blood stain in the apartment was left unresolved. Upon careful reading, it becomes apparent that the subplots about the brother and boyfriend have been concocted to draw an implied parallel in the philosophical hallucination scene where Tassie encounters the apparitions of Robert and Reynaldo - the soldier and the terrorist.

The subplot on Sarah’s wretched past exposes another frantic attempt to hold the plot together. The author struggles to depict an extreme account of neglect to convince the readers as to why the agency would revoke the adoption. The book can be so much better if the author does away with this subplot, or at least conjures a credible case of neglect and a more palatable aftermath.

The subplot about the adoption of the black toddler into the white household makes for a delightful read. The conversations of the support group, the cacophony of voices and opinions are realistic, which in itself is not easy to accomplish.  There’s one little grouse though – why is there a need to make Mary-Emma the toddler “spectacularly pretty?”  “Everyone loved a beautiful baby, no matter what,” says the protagonist. It would be interesting to see how the story plays out if she had been an ordinary looking child.

The author has artistically nailed a somber mood throughout the book, reflecting the gravity of its many themes. A sense of solemnity permeates even during its funny or lighter moments. The pace is uneven- too little happening at the beginning, a flood of action towards the end. The writing style is superlative. At times however, the descriptions and the imagery get excessive, and meanders away from the story; be it the random descriptions of the squirrel that lay dead on the road, the university stadium through the seasons, or the flowers that grow in the yard. The luscious sample of food writing is delectable, but it quickly gets tedious. And of some farcical imagery - “I could peer up her nostrils, the weave of tiny hairs like the crisscross of branches seen from the base of a tree”- sometimes the less said the better. Not that the descriptions aren’t interesting; they are remarkably well-written and original, but without the backbone of a solid plot, they read like a pointless exercise in creative writing.

As for the title A Gate at the Stairs, its interpretation can be subjective. Having a restraining gate is like living in a safety bubble, one imagines that one is secure, but life proves otherwise; the experiences of Tassie show that nothing can prepare or shield one from the roller coaster ride of life. “Life was unendurable, and yet everywhere it was endured.” P.432. A gate could be an allegory for a sense of safety, or protection, because Tassie endures and overcomes. There’s no conclusive statement about the significance of the title though; it can mean different things to different readers – with good or bad repercussions for the book. An aimless plot catering to a medley of themes can potentially leave the reader as deluded and clueless as Tassie herself. Much as I admire the author’s lyrical prose and her insights on universal questions, I wish she builds a strong, foolproof plot that holds the book together and embodies the power of her prose. If the author does not infuse her message more carefully into the book, we can foresee her readers and reviewers question - “What’s the whole point?”