1 out of 4 stars
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Boundaries by Divya Chawla is a novella in the fiction genre. The novella is suitable for readers in the six to ten age group.
The story revolves around the families residing in the ‘Swaghat’ (it means ‘welcome’ in Hindi) residential apartment building, which is centrally located in the city of Chennai, India. Sarojini, Meenakshi and Arundhati are three young girls who live in this building with their families and go the same school. While they are best friends, their parents might be less so. There are other young kids in the apartment building who study in the same school with them. The story goes on to explain the different values held dear by the families living in this neighborhood.
This book was categorized in the Other Fiction category when it was up for review, however, in my opinion it is more suited to the Children's book category. The description of the book provided on the Amazon website is somewhat misleading since the book fell far short of my expectations. Throughout the short story, I was constantly reminded of the chapters (containing stories) in my third grade literature textbook, with plenty of typological errors. The author’s writing style indicates her good command over the language but multiple typological errors in a story as short as this will cause quite an annoyance to the reader.
Coming to the content, it is difficult to grasp the essence of the story or what the reader is trying to convey. On the face of it, the story lacks substance and seems to endlessly describe the different families living in the apartment complex. However, once I got over my initial irritation, I could fathom that the author was trying to convey the everyday peculiarities of a typical South Indian neighborhood. For example, the theme of linguistic pride is expressed in the story through the disinclination of the locals in Chennai to speak any other regional language apart from their own i.e. Tamil. The story looks at other societal attitudes like parents wanting to educate their children overseas, the distinction between the traditional and broad minded attitudes of different families and their varied ambitions in life.
The biggest drawback of this novella is that it lacks a solid story, which is pretty unfortunate looking at the substantial material the author had before her. The author could have spun a wonderful tale out of the cultural diversity or different mindsets that she portrays in her story, but the story just restricts itself to being a descriptive exercise. I rate it 1 out of 4 stars.
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Boundaries
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Yeah, I hope too that the complete novel turns out better.
