TUESDAY ~ Book Review : 8

A DISOBEDIENT GIRL BY RU FREEMAN 

                                                    


A Disobedient Girl follows two women struggling to retain control of their lives in the face of servitude. Latha is a servant girl to the affluent Vithanage family, whose daughter, Thara, is Latha's age. As children, the girls are the best of friends, but they are destined to be separated by class, which is made painfully obvious when boys come into the picture. Meanwhile, Biso serves a cruel and drunken husband who beats her and terrorises her children, one of whom is another man's love child. Biso's husband murdered her lover in a hateful rage when he uncovered her affair and she realises that she must escape his house if she and her children are to live. Latha too seeks escape, but she finds it in the arms of Thara's boyfriend and this sets off a chain of events that will echo far into her future.



Will Biso manage to find refuge far away in the hill-country with her relatives despite the long and treacherous journey she must make to get there? What will become of the pregnant, disgraced Latha and what will survive of her relationship with Thara? Ru Freeman follows these two women throughout the twists and turns of their respective lives in a way that will have you hooked from the very first page. The voices she creates for her women are strong, authentic and distinctively female. Both of the women define themselves as mothers, daughters, sisters - but also as individuals, and it is this individuality of spirit, even in women who are bowed by circumstance, that Freeman depicts so skilfully. These women are determined and proud.   At times they are vain and brittle. Occasionally they are spiteful - but at all times they are real and overwhelmingly likeable. However, this is not simply a story about tough women. The intricate rules of caste, class and race in Sri Lankan society are omnipresent here, casting long shadows over everyone's lives - even those of the men. There's so much detail, so much to learn in this book - but it's still ultimately an easy read. Freeman's effortless prose covers every aspect of human life without ever seeming to get tangled or boring.
The author gives you such a strong sense of place that you can practically feel the sun on your skin, the sea salt in your hair. It's escapism, although certainly not always to a happier world. Indeed, secrecy lurks in the households in this book. It lurks in every corner, but it can't live there forever, as the author attests to in her explosive conclusion.
A Disobedient Girl has a truly epic feel, the way it weaves whole lives and families, accommodating decades of hope and disappointment with genuine style.      

About Ru Freeman  

Ru Freeman was born into a family of writers and many boys in Colombo, Sri Lanka. After a year of informal study at Murdoch University in Perth, Western Australia, she arrived in the United States with a Parker ink pen and a box of Staedler pencils to attend Bates College in Maine. She completed her Masters in Labor Relations at the University of Colombo, and worked in the field of American and international humanitarian assistance and workers’ rights. Her political writing has appeared in English and in translation. Her creative work has appeared or is forthcoming in Guernica, Story Quarterly, Crab Orchard Review, World Literature Today, WriteCorner Press, Kaduwa, Pebble Lake Review, r.k.v.r.y, Post Road, Confessions: Fact or Fiction? and elsewhere and has been nominated for the Best New American Voices anthologies in 2006 and 2008. She has been awarded four consecutive writing scholarships to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference from 2006-2009. She is a contributing editorial board member of the Asian American Literary Review, and a fellow of Yaddo. and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Her debut novel, A Disobedient Girl, which was long-listed for the DSC South Asian Literary Prize, is published by Atria Books/Simon & Schuster in the USA and Canada, by Viking/Penguin in the UK and territories, and has been translated into Dutch, Italian, Simplified and Complex Chinese, Portuguese, Turkish and Hebrew and is available in Audio from Tantor Media. She calls both Sri Lanka and America home and writes about the people and countries underneath her skin . You can visit her blog at http://rufreeman.com/blog/

                                                                                                                  

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Posted by Michelle . You can visit my blog at http://writer-in-transit.co.za