Hardcover | Delacorte Books for Young Readers | August 2004 | $15.95
With the rise of South Asians in America, the need for good South Asian fiction grows as well. The adult market is fulfilled by writers such as Arundhati Roy, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, and Rohinton Mistry, but the young adult section is woefully bare. In the age when most identity crises develop because of the juxtaposition of the native culture of their parents with the culture they are living in, many seek out an explanation for their feelings, or at least empathy from others. The media can often provide this, being a source that teenagers will readily turn to. Mitali Perkins, in her latest novel Monsoon Summer, attempts to reach out to those in that inconvenient age that is known as adolescence, further complicated by their confusion in identities.
Jazz is a biracial fifteen year old girl who lives in Berkeley, California. She runs a successful business (The Biz) that takes up much of her time with her friend Steve. With an Indian mother and a white father, Jazz occasionally feels trapped between two cultures. It is not the social aspects that bother her while in America; rather, it is the similarity in appearance to her father, and her worry about being a big girl. Built for athleticism and strength, she fears that she may not be attractive to Steve, for whom she has recently developed feelings.
The summer after her sophomore year of high school, Jazz is informed that she must go with her family to India to visit the orphanage where her mother had stayed. Jazz is bitterly disappointed by the loss of a chance to spend the summer with The Biz and Steve. She is frightened by the prospect of having to face an entirely different culture in a place far away. When she arrives, the hustle and bustle, the colors, and the attitudes of people are so different that it is too much for her to take. While she is able to find the beauty in certain things, her mindset is trapped back in America, and she chooses the option of going to a local school instead of joining work at the orphanage like the rest of her family.
Slowly however, through conversations with Danita, a girl her age who cooks for her family, Jazz begins to realize the beauty of the culture in India, and even learns to accept her own body as beautiful, and has the courage to tell Steve about her feelings, and is delighted to find that he returns them. Danita helps her realize her goals, while Jazz teaches her about creating her own business so that she will not have to marry a man much older than her in order to support herself and her two sisters. In the end, Jazz's monsoon summer in India has a thoroughly happy ending.
While Monsoon Summer has all the elements of a novel that illustrates an identity conflict, it is easy to wonder whether such stories in real life get resolved so easily. Every thread in the story is tied up happily by the end, leaving us with a more mature and self-confident heroine who has grown in obvious ways. A feel good story for the young adult, it illustrates life's insecurities, although perhaps in a slightly more simplistic way than we understand them.
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