Anosh Irani’s The Parcel hooked me from the very first line: “I go by many names, none of my own choosing.”

In Madhu, Irani has created such a beautifully arresting and evocative heroine whose story just draws the reader in and refuses to let go. This is particularly significant since Madhu’s story isn’t an easy one to read, and Madhu herself isn’t an easy person to root for, given what she is tasked to do. See, Madhu’s job is to ready a parcel for delivery, and in this case, ‘parcel’ refers to a ten year old girl from the provinces who was sold by her family into prostitution, and ‘delivery’ means readying the girl for the man who bought her.

I struggled to write this review, because, really, how can I admit feeling empathy for a character who does such a horrible thing? How can I detest what Madhu is doing while still in many ways understanding why she is doing it? It’s a terrible, inescapable tension that permeated my entire experience of reading this book, and it’s made even more difficult by the realization that there are likely people in the real world who live as Irani’s characters do and who face the same situation as Madhu and the parcel and the other characters in this book do. I’m not completely sure how I feel about this book or its characters, but I do believe it’s a testament to Irani’s writing that the book has affected me this much.

Irani plunges us deep into Madhu’s life, and shows us the world of Kamathipura, a red light district in Bombay, India, through her eyes. Madhu is a eunuch and a hijra, one who is neither man nor woman but a third gender. At forty, she is too old to continue as a prostitute, and based on experience, too ill-suited for performing at weddings. She is thus relegated to begging for alms from passengers in taxis, and when her hijra clan’s leader Gurumai orders her to prepare a parcel for a powerful brothel owner, Madhu can’t refuse.

In some ways, Madhu sees her task as merciful. Rather than the usual way of ‘opening’ a ‘parcel’ through force, Madhu takes the time to first remove any last shred of hope or humanity in the girl. Madhu’s reluctance is clear — she distances herself from the girl’s humanity, referring to her as a ‘parcel’ throughout, yet at one point, loses control and lashes out during a particularly disturbing stage of the preparation process. Madhu also clearly forms an empathetic link with the girl, being reminded of the past as she tries to make the girl break all links to her own past.

What’s clear is that Madhu views her work as necessary. She says that hope is dangerous, and the sooner a parcel accepts her fate, the easier it will be. So much of me rebels against this, yet part of me is also aware that, for Madhu and other hijras, and for so many other characters in this book, hope is indeed futile. Among the most heart-wrenching scenes in this book are centred on hope — Madhu standing on a bridge and looking at her childhood home wondering if she can ever return, or an elderly hijra Bulbul listening to the radio and absolutely certain she hears coded messages from a former lover who wants her back.

The full extent of Irani’s talent, however, is not in the bleakness of such themes, but in teasing out the strands of light and humanity in them. I absolutely love the community of hijras in Irani’s Kamathipura, in particular Gurumai and Bulbul, who take Madhu into their family and become the loving and accepting mother and sister she never had. I love how they take in hijra prostitutes who are ‘pojeetive’ or have angered their clan leader and are therefore cast out from the hijra community. Even these loving relationships and close-knit communities aren’t perfect — Gurumai is a maternal figure yet still takes her share of Madhu’s earnings — and it’s this inextricable intertwining of the positives and the negatives that make this world feel ever more real.

The Parcel is not an easy read, but it’s a powerful one. Irani’s world of hijras in Kamathipura will move you, and Madhu’s story will stick with you long after you finish reading.

Anosh Irani’s appearances at Toronto’s 2016 International Festival of Authors:

• Monday October 24 8pm “GGs at IFOA”
• Thursday October 27 8pm “Reading Award Winners”
• Sunday October 30 3:30pm “Stories of Redemption” (Reading/Round Table)

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Thank you to Penguin Random House Canada for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review, and to the International Festival of Authors and blog tour organizer Buried in Print for the invitation to participate in this blog tour!

I’m a happily self-confessed crazy cat lady, so when I see the adorable kitten on the cover of this book and when I learn that it’s about how cats are ruling the world, it was like bookish catnip to me.

Abigail Tucker, a cat lady herself, knows her audience, and so wastes no time trying to convince us of how cute and adorable our little felines are. Rather, she delves into a scientific socio-cultural history of the species to argue her main point that the proper reaction to a house cat isn’t “awww,” but rather awe. Cats are amazing creatures not because they’re adorable and can be amused for hours by a ball of yarn, but rather because they are evolutionary masterminds, weaving their way into our hearts and homes sometimes despite all human efforts to the contrary.

Tucker begins the book with a sobering look at the endangerment and sometimes extinction of some wildcats. Due to human encroachment into their territory, lions, tigers and other wildcats are losing access to food, and far from the kings and queens of the jungle they used to be, they are now often seen in zoos and controlled sanctuaries. The house cat is therefore the evolutionary answer to human civilization — while jungle cats can’t survive in the wilds of an urban landscape, their smaller and more domesticated versions are better equipped to live in apartments and other human dwellings.

The book is chockfull of many such interesting tidbits of cat information that many cat lovers will geek out over. Most interesting to me is that the facial features of the contemporary house cat are very similar to those of lions and tigers, and that this is unusual for domesticated animals. Tucker hypothesizes that this is because, unlike dogs whom humans have bred for specific purposes, cats don’t really serve humans any purpose except to exist, and so their evolution has been mostly left alone. At one point, Tucker says, “We like to chuckle at feline savagery in miniature–but only now that we’ve won. Maybe a lion purring in our lap or cavorting in our living room evokes our global mastery, our total control of nature.” (p. 24) I admit I rebelled against that thought; I hate to think of my cooing over my cat as a form of gloating of my dominance over him. But then I remember how I laugh when he playfully nibbles at my hand, knowing he won’t actually break skin, and I wonder if Tucker may have been on to something after all.

Tucker also observes that cats’ faces are a “mesmerizing” combination of deadly killer and adorable baby, and that this effect is especially potent to women of reproductive age. I don’t know how much that is or can be backed up by science, but she supports it with some observational research on cat shows, where the language used to describe cats (“little girl” or “little boy”) sounds very maternal.

She also writes a lot about the effect of cats on a neighbourhood (sometimes the endangerment or extinction of rodent or avian species), advocacy around cats (“TNR” or trap-neuter-return as the preferred method to deal with stray cats), and on a lighter note, celebrity cats. I particularly like a chapter where she talks about how cats train their humans. According to Tucker, “These cues are unique and don’t translate across homes – an owner can heed his cat’s specific directives, but not necessarily the cat next door’s.” This training is so complete that MRI’s show “blood-flow patterns of our brains change with the tenor of the feline voice.” (p. 132) Isn’t that fascinating?

In short, whatever you feel about cats, this book is unlikely to change your mind. It’s a total geek-fest of cat history and evolution, and will likely reinforce whatever you already feel about cats in general. Are they supreme killers destroying bird and rat lives in the neighbourhood or are they highly intelligent predators who deserve their spot at the top of the food chain? Is their training of humans utterly diabolical or fantastically clever? Is it worth the time and effort to trap-neuter-return when the stats show this method having little effect on the cat population? (A note that other, deadlier measures are also shown by stats to be ineffective, and I was glad to hear that.)

I really loved this book and, as you can see from my Goodreads status updates, I geeked out over practically every chapter. Read it, enjoy, and gaze at your cat in awe for the clever little hunter and ruler they are.

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Thank you to Simon and Schuster Canada for an advance reading copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Ruth Jefferson is an African-American nurse who is pulled from the care of a newborn patient upon the request of his white supremacist parents. When the child dies while Ruth is alone in the ward, she is charged with causing his death, either through negligence or wilful murder. The story is told through three perspectives: Ruth’s, the baby’s father Turk, and Ruth’s lawyer Kennedy McQuarrie, a white public defender and a liberal who is forced by this trial to confront her own privilege and unconscious racism.

Jodi Picoult is never one to shy away from relevant social issues, and Small Great Things is no exception. To be honest, I don’t know quite how I feel about a white author telling a story of a Black woman’s experience of racism. To be fair, Picoult acknowledges the potentially problematic nature of this in her Author’s Note, and admits she struggled with it personally. Her solution was that she wasn’t writing it “to tell people of colour what their own lives were like” but rather “to my own community,” white people who recognize racism in a neo-Nazi skinhead but can’t recognize their own racism. I also don’t know how I feel about a story of racism becoming a story about confronting one’s own white privilege, but I admit that’s my own bias going in, and I may have felt differently if the author were a person of colour.

To Picoult’s credit, Kennedy realizes the importance of letting Ruth speak for herself on the stand, despite the risk it poses for their case. Kennedy also learns that some of the beliefs she’s long held as “liberal” are actually problematic, for example, the idea that she “doesn’t see colour.” That being said, there’s a moment near the end that made me cringe, where Kennedy gives her closing remarks to the jury and Ruth thinks

What Kennedy has said to all those strangers, it’s been the narrative of my life, the outline inside of which I have lived. But I could have screamed it from the rooftops, and it wouldn’t have done any good. For the jurors to hear it, really hear it, it had to be said by one of their own. [p. 432]

Yikes. To be clear: there is nothing wrong with Kennedy giving the closing remarks, because obviously, she’s the lawyer. Also to be fair, there is probably some truth in Ruth’s assertion above. But to have a Black character think this, particularly after they’ve had their own moment to speak and particularly within the context of celebration at potentially winning the case, felt wrong. It feels like buying into the whole White Saviour trope, and it hurt to read.

That being said, the story was engaging and an entertaining read. I like Kennedy’s character arc, and I especially like the dynamic between Ruth and her son Edison. I also like how Picoult includes Turk’s perspective, because on one hand, he’s a totally reprehensible character but on the other hand, he’s also an object of sympathy, because he’s lost his son. It’s disturbing to think that the things in Turk’s life that Picoult writes about are true (e.g. children’s parties where the piñata is shaped like a person of colour and where rather than pin the tail on the donkey, they pin a star on a Jew), but there likely are such horrible people in the world, and I’m sure there’s much worse than what Picoult included.

Picoult’s endings usually feature a surprise twist or two, and while I usually enjoy her books, I often don’t like the endings because these twists feel contrived to me. True to form, there is a surprise twist in this book as well, which I felt was unnecessary, but I actually liked the ending overall. The twist in this case felt like a minor hiccup that didn’t really change the outcome, and while the ending still felt a bit convenient, it also seemed fitting for the story and I’m glad that it happened.

I do have some mixed feelings about this book, but overall, it’s an entertaining read that prompts reflection about some difficult subjects. As Picoult points out, it’s easy to see racism when it’s someone else perpetuating it, especially if they have a swastika tattooed on their head, but it’s also important to see our own complicity in it, and to see the ways in which despite our liberal beliefs, we can also be racist.

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Thanks to Penguin Random House Canada for an advance reading copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.