Appeared in India Currents Magazine

Radical Spirits: India’s First Woman Doctor and Her American Champions by Nandini Patwardhan

7 Apr 2020 by Jeanne E. Fredriksen

Biographies such as Radical Spirits: India’s First Woman Doctor and Her American Champions, Nandini Patwardhan’s engrossing biography of Dr. Anandibai Joshee, celebrate women while underscoring their plight. Born in March 1865, married at the age of nine, and pregnant as a young teen, Joshee lost a son only 10 days following his birth. Because she had eagerly embraced education under her husband’s tutelage, she reasoned her loss was due to an absolute lack of healthcare for women. This led her […]

Categories: Adult Readers, Appeared in India Currents Magazine, Book Reviews, India, Young Adult Readers • Tags: Dr Anandibai Joshee, Indian Women in History, Women in Medicine

The Atlas of Reds and Blues by Devi S. Laskar

11 Feb 2020 by Jeanne E. Fredriksen

Black and White Are Not Colors • The second-generation Bengali woman known as Mother in Devi S. Laskar’s emotionally raw debut novel, The Atlas of Reds and Blues, is forty-three years, six months, twenty-five days old when an unexpected, swift, and tragic chain of events transpires. Upon returning home from dropping her three young daughters at school, agents storm her house, she refuses to remain silent, then she finds herself lying on her driveway in an Atlanta suburb, bleeding from […]

Categories: Adult Readers, Appeared in India Currents Magazine, Book Reviews • Tags: 2nd generation, family, guns, violence to POC

An English Made in India: How a Foreign Language Became Local by Kalpana Mohan

22 Jan 2020 by Jeanne E. Fredriksen

Language is fluid, and anyone who has successfully made it to adulthood has experienced slang growing into accepted usage and accepted usage shifting as new verbal practices infiltrate conversation and the written word. Such is the conundrum India has encountered since the British East India Company carried out the will of its crown. In her engaging, entertaining, and educational book, An English Made in India: How a Foreign Language Became Local, Kalpana Mohan cleverly mixes pieces of India’s history with […]

Categories: Adult Readers, Appeared in India Currents Magazine, Book Reviews, India, language • Tags: India, language, non-fiction

The Widows of Malabar Hill by Sujata Massey

20 Feb 2018 by Jeanne E. Fredriksen

Mistry Mystery: Solved in New Series • The Widows of Malabar Hill by Sujata Massey. Soho Crime/Soho Press, Inc.: New York. 400 pages. Hardcover. Also available as a digital book. Sujata Massey, the award-winning author of the Rei Shimura mystery series, The Sleeping Dictionary (IC, Sept. 2014), and India Gray: Historical Fiction (IC, Feb. 2016), debuted a new legal mystery series in January that is certain to please a wide range of readers. Set in 1920s Bombay, the series launched […]

Categories: Adult Readers, Appeared in India Currents Magazine, Book Reviews

My Best Books for Youth in 2017

3 Jan 2018 by Jeanne E. Fredriksen

I am a Books for Youth reviewer for Booklist, a publication of the American Library Association, which means I have the privilege of reading 60 to 70 books a year for early, middle grade, young adult, and new adult readers before they’re published. Whatever the magazine sends me, I read and review. I have the privilege of reading debut novels, works from authors just a few books old, and books from established authors. The fact that I am able to […]

Categories: Appeared in Booklist/ALA, Appeared in India Currents Magazine, Book Reviews

A Life of Adventure and Delight by Akhil Sharma

16 Dec 2017 by Jeanne E. Fredriksen

Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness • From the award-winning author of An Obedient Father (2001 Hemingway Foundation PEN Award) and Family Life (2014 New York Times Best Books of the Year; 2015 Folio Prize; and 2016 International DUBLIN Literary Award), comes a collection of short stories that entertains and spares no one. In Akhil Sharma’s A Life of Adventure and Delight, eight stories explore the quest for perceptible love, the life and liberty of relationships, and the perpetual […]

Categories: Adult Readers, Appeared in India Currents Magazine, Book Reviews

When Dimple Met Rishi by Sandhya Menon

30 Nov 2017 by Jeanne E. Fredriksen

Young Adult Rom-Com for the Win! • A New York Times bestseller • Girl has goal (break the glass ceiling in the world of coding without “IIH” distractions). Boy has goal (woo the girl his parents have arranged for him to marry before they both go off to college). Boy meets girl but stages disastrous introduction (“Hello, future wife. I can’t wait to get started on the rest of our lives!”). Girl tosses Starbucks iced coffee at this “loony bin […]

Categories: Appeared in India Currents Magazine, Book Reviews, New Adult, Punctuation, Young Adult Readers

Murder Between the Lines by Radha Vatsal

11 Sep 2017 by Jeanne E. Fredriksen

Murder Mystery Goes Back 100 Years • It’s 1915, before the United States entered what we now call World War I and became a superpower. Women were cared for by their fathers or husbands, and those who wanted to work were allowed to choose from a handful of socially-acceptable jobs. Women could neither vote nor sit on juries as peers, yet women were speaking out and marching for their rights. It was an exciting time for America as the country […]

Categories: Adult Readers, Appeared in India Currents Magazine, Book Reviews

Everybody’s Son by Thrity Umrigar

26 Jul 2017 by Jeanne E. Fredriksen

Race, Privilege, and Politics • Nine-year-old Anton Vesper—beautiful, bright, biracial—finds himself in the foster care system after having spent a week alone and locked in a stifling apartment waiting for his crack-addicted mother to return. However, his new foster father, David Coleman, a judge with a political pedigree, will do anything to keep the boy and his mother from reuniting, even if it means doing something shrouded in deceit and corruption. He feels it’s his duty and, in the Coleman […]

Categories: Adult Readers, Appeared in India Currents Magazine, Book Reviews

When Loose Ends Meet

Connecting the frayed ends of reading, writing, and living

Category Archives: Appeared in India Currents Magazine

Radical Spirits: India’s First Woman Doctor and Her American Champions by Nandini Patwardhan

The Atlas of Reds and Blues by Devi S. Laskar

An English Made in India: How a Foreign Language Became Local by Kalpana Mohan

The Widows of Malabar Hill by Sujata Massey

My Best Books for Youth in 2017

A Life of Adventure and Delight by Akhil Sharma

When Dimple Met Rishi by Sandhya Menon

Murder Between the Lines by Radha Vatsal

Everybody’s Son by Thrity Umrigar