Diandra Reviews It All

Synopsis: In this astonishing novel, Shanthi Sekaran gives voice to the devotion and anguish of motherhood through two women bound together by their love for one boy. Soli, a young undocumented Mexican woman in Berkeley, CA, finds that motherhood offers her an identity in a world where she’s otherwise invisible. When she is placed in immigrant detention, her son comes under the care of Kavya, an Indian-American wife overwhelmed by her own impossible desire to have a child. As Soli fights for her son, Kavya builds her love on a fault line, her heart wrapped around someone else’s child. Exploring the ways in which dreams and determination can reshape a family, Sekaran transforms real life into a thing of beauty. From rural Oaxaca to Berkeley’s Gourmet Ghetto to the dreamscapes of Silicon Valley, Lucky Boy offers a moving and revelatory look at the evolving landscape of the American dream and the ever-changing borders of love.

Excuse me as I cry all over Shanthi Sekaran’s Lucky Boy! In these times when being an immigrant is treated like a social disease, Sekaran’s book reminds us that anyone who leaves their home is doing so in need; not in malice. Enter the two protagonists, Soli, an undocumented immigrant from Mexico, and Kavya, a young, Indian woman desperate to have a child, whom become forever intertwined by their love for a baby boy named, Ignacio.

via GIPHY How This Book Left Me

Even writing this review has me choked up because Sekaran writes for the good people of this world faced with difficult choices. Both Soli and Kavya are wonderful human beings, which is why their stories leave you torn, and their experiences allow you to discover lives you may not know for their struggle. From infertility to life as a person on the cusp of deportation, this story has so many gut-wrenching details, you might need a few breathers. Watching people go through unwarranted sufferings and pain is rough enough, but, when they are good human beings trying to achieve dreams and better for themselves, you feel extra devastated. Luckily, Sekaran writing is so beautiful and vivid that the tragedy of this challenging tale becomes addictive and absorbing. Lucky Boy thrives as a story because it shows that, sometimes, your “worst enemy” is life, and then what? Good people have horrible things happen to them, of which “blame” cannot be so easily, if not at all, placed on someone. It is the murkiness of aperson’s lower, social placing compared to their higher spirituality from which Sekaran plucks the characterization of her protagonists and leaves me balling in fetal position. I love and hate that at the end of this book I do not feel good. I do not feel like anyone “truly” won, or, at least, if they did, it was through a lot of loss. Yet, THIS IS LIFE! We win some and we lose some, and both victory and tragedy can be as hard as the other to take in.

I must continue to praise Shanthi Sekaran. Not only has she made a novel so relevant and poignant to our times, but she has done it through gorgeous prose and a riveting plot. Immigration is such a massive, hot topic that can bring out the worst, most hateful sides of people, but Sekaran’s novel reminds us of the humanity behind this topic. For More Information On Lucky Boy and to Buy It One September 5 Click Here.