A young man, Harry Raven, is called back to a tribe he had never heard of. He was adopted before age one by an older couple in Seattle after being abandoned by his parents because they were unable to care for him.

As a successful programmer, he begins to have strange dreams and eventually leaves his job to seek his calling.

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The background for a five book series.
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should be required reading for all humans.

I fell in love with Lahiri after reading "The Interpreter of Maladies" and credit her with drawing me in to a love of well written short stories. This book did not disappoint. In fact, a few weeks after finishing it, the characters are still very much with me--a true sign of a great book.

A young minister who has two years to live learns about the meaning of life when he is sent to an Indian parish in British Columbia. Book Club pick.

The novel is divided into three parts, each with a different narrator. Part 1, set in the 1980's and ranging from Seattle to a reservation in Montana, is narrated by fifteen-year-old Rayona Taylor. The daughter of a black man and an Indian woman, Rayona has an extra load of problems on top of the usual burdens of adolescence. Reared largely by her mother, she has had to learn to take care of herself. She tells her story in a winning way, with a teenager's familiar mixture of irony and self-doubt.

Part 2 is narrated by Rayona's mother, Christine. Some of the events recounted by the daughter in part 1 are replayed from the mother's point of view; most of this section, though, flashes back to reservation life in the 1960's, when, disappointed by the failure of an apocalyptic prophecy, Christine rejected the superstition-ridden Catholicism that had fueled her girlhood piety and began to live with self-destructive heedlessness.

The novel's concluding section, by far the shortest of the three, steps back yet another generation, to the 1940's; here, too, scenes from preceding sections take on new meaning as they are retold from another perspective.

This novel is not without flaws. The language of the first-person narrators (especially after Rayona's section) frequently lacks credibility; one thinks: This character would not express herself that way. The supporting characters are too predictable. There are moments of reverse racism, including a silly contrast between English and the Indian language that is kept alive even in Rayona's generation.

I have yet to read something by Chitra Divakaruni that didn't leave me longing for more--longer stories, more novels. Still, I am glad she takes the time to turn out such finely crafted works.