GOLD DIGGER {PDF} DOWNLOAD BY SANJENA SATHIAN

 GOLD DIGGER 

BY 

SANJENA SATHIAN

Published:   Apr 6 2021

Category:    Fantasy , Cultural india , Contemporary , literacy                 fiction,magical realism ,adult fiction,young adult coming of age

Author:    Sanjena Sathian

Pages:    260

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Gold Diggers is an Indian-American story unlike any I've read before. It's quite a unique  novel, focused on the desi diaspora in the US.

The book aims to be a bildungsroman-cum-heist-cum-literary fiction-magical realism. It performs wonderfully in the bildungsroman part, 

I did love the caricatured sarcasm in the book.

 It takes a not-so-subtle dig at all those Indian Americans who want the best of American opportunities while looking down on American values. They want their children to succeed at engineering or any such prominent field, they want their children to aim at the elite universities, they want their children to avoid alcohol and drugs and premarital sex and get married to their chosen Indian partner after "settling" in the career. All the parents portrayed in the novel except Anjali are stereotypical. 

I also appreciate how the author didn't present a picture-perfect cultured Indian-in-America story. The younger generation is shown to have American struggles, American thinking, American attitudes, while still having the Indian guilt hammered in them courtesy their parents. Neil feels tremendous pressure from his parents to become "something", to justify their "shift across the oceans". It's a nice insight into the pressure that the younger generation (born in America to desi parents) feels regularly.

All in all, this was a book that had tremendous potential.

 

SUMMARY

A floundering second-generation teenager growing up in the Bush-era Atlanta suburbs, Neil Narayan is authentic, funny, and smart. He just doesn't share the same drive as everyone around him. His perfect older sister is headed to Duke. His parents' expectations for him are just as high. He tries to want this version of success, but mostly, Neil just wants his neighbor across the cul-de-sac, Anita Dayal.

But Anita has a secret: she and her mother Anjali have been brewing an ancient alchemical potion from stolen gold that harnesses the ambition of the jewelry's original owner. Anjali's own mother in Bombay didn't waste the precious potion on her daughter, favoring her sons instead. Anita, on the other hand, just needs a little boost to get into Harvard. But when Neil--who needs a whole lot more--joins in the plot, events spiral into a tragedy that rips their community apart.

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Ten years later, Neil is an oft-stoned Berkeley history grad student studying the California gold rush. His high school cohort has migrated to Silicon Valley, where he reunites with Anita and resurrects their old habit of gold theft--only now, the stakes are higher. Anita's mother is in trouble, and only gold can save her. Anita and Neil must pull off one last heist.

Gold Diggers is a fine-grained, profoundly intelligent, and bitingly funny investigation in to questions of identity and coming of age--that tears down American shibboleths. 

Read full book here....