Author: Kamala Markandaya
# of Pages: 186 (paperback)
Genre: Historical Fiction, Cultural, Classics
Rating: ★★★★☆
Synopsis: Married as a child bride to a tenant farmer she had never seen, she worked side by side in the field with her husband to wrest a living from land that was ravaged by droughts, monsoons, and insects. With remarkable fortitude ad courage, she sought to meet the challenge of changing times and to fight poverty and disaster. She saw one of her infants die from starvation, her daughter become a prostitute, and her sons leave the land for jobs that she distrusted. And somehow she survived....This beautiful and eloquent story tells of a simple peasant woman in a primitive village in India whose whole life was a gallant and persistent battle to care for those she loved.
Review: As you might have observed by now, I did not read this by choosing, but I will write a review for it all the same.
Nectar in a Sieve is relatively short but interesting read. The protagonist, Rukmani, marries a man of lower class than she and finds many hardships in her life (as in third-world problems). Therefore, this book is VERY DEPRESSING. The reader is dragged along on this journey of never-ending torture and may be emotionally affected!
My biggest complaint is that the book was a little too short. The plot seemed to be extremely compress, and my sense of time was a bit off. By the end of the book, I still pictured Rukmani as a much younger person than she is at that point. Also, Markandaya could have extended the plot a bit more so that the reader could find out what happens to the characters after the end of the book
For those of you who have not read this book and would usually not read a book of cultural/historical fiction/classic genres, I would highly suggest that you give it a try. It's not a hard read at all; I recommend it!
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