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There are currently 17 member reviews
for The Toss of a Lemon
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Iliana (Austin TX)
The Toss of a Lemon
Author Padma Viswanathan sets out to tell an epic story of a woman and her family living in India from 1896-1962. Sivakami is a Brahamin woman who is married off at 10 but by the time she is 18 she's already a widow.
She has two children but her life is dictated by what is expected of widowed women, basically that they shut themselves off from society because after all something must be wrong for them to be widow. It is as if they were a bad omen.
Interesting tidbits of what is expected of widowed women are shared in this narrative. That in my opinion is the strength of the novel but even though this is supposed to be the story of Sivakami, I felt that I still didn't know her well enough at the end of the book. I wanted to know what she thought of all the rules placed before her.
Normally I don't judge a book by its size but in this case I do think the novel went on for too long.
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Katharine (Boulder CO)
Toss of a Lemon
On the back cover of my advanced copy, Yann Martel (Life of Pi author) challenges the reader to "start reading this book and give up on it". Well, I did, and I am...for now. This is the story of Sivakami, a woman (1896-1962) who, because of her Brahmin class, was forced to live a secluded life .. widowed at 18 with two children, she is so bound up in tradition and ritual that I finally had to break out of her daily life and come up for air. Extraordinarily well written, the book is redolent with the wonderful smells and tastes that Indian novels tend to portray, and the details of the daily events of village life are interesting, and I really want to know more about the siddhas, who are naked, ash covered, skinny, itinerant ascetics. For now, though, I have to leave this 600-page still life of ash, and gold, and lemons.
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Barbara Hay (Walnut Creek CA)
The Toss of a Lemon
I found this book very tedious reading ... I had to push myself to finish. Great story and family but it took the author too long to tell it.
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