Story Description:
Harlequin|September
24, 2013|Trade Paperback|ISBN: 978-0-7783-1547-6
Layla Roy has defied the fates.
Despite being born under an inauspicious
horoscope, she is raised to be educated and independent by her eccentric
grandfather,Dadamoshai. And, by cleverly manipulating the hand fortune has
dealt her, she has even found love with Manik Deb, a man betrothed to
another. All were minor miracles in
India that spring of 1943, when young women’s lives were predetermined if not
by the stars, then by centuries of family tradition and social order.
Layla’s life as a newly married woman takes her
away from home and into the jungles of Assam, where the world’s finest tea
thrives on plantations run by native labor and British efficiency. Fascinated by this culture of whiskey-soaked
expats who seems fazed by neither earthquakes nor man-eating leopards, she
struggles to find her place among the prickly English wives with whom she is
expected to socialize, and the peculiar servants she now finds under her
charge.
But navigating the tea-garden set will hardly be
her biggest challenge. Layla’s remote
home is not safe from the powerful changes sweeping India on the heels of the
Second World War. Their colonial society
is at a tipping point, and Layla and Manik find themselves caught in a perilous
racial divide that threatens their very lives.
My Review:
Layla Roy was born underneath an unlucky star
which makes her a “manglik” according to her Hindu culture. For Laya, growing up in the 1940’s, this is
bad news because Mars is predominant in her Hindu horoscope and this angry red
planet makes people rebellious and militant by nature.
However, this began to change for Layla on April
7, 1943. Three things happened that day
but the most important was that Layla Roy, seventeen-years-old, fell in love
with Manik Deb.
Dadamoshai, Layla’s grandfather was opening a new
girl’s school in their town. The morning
of the opening there were protestors carrying signs with misspelled words. Earlier that morning, Dadamoshai had chased
the demonstrators away down the road yelling at them to “learn to spell before
you go around demonstrating your nitwit ideas.”
Dadamoshai was an advocate of English education
and nothing bugged him more than the massacre of the English language. He was an imposing man and had once been the
most powerful District Judge in the state of Assam. People respectfully stepped aside when the
saw him coming. To most people he was
known as Rai Bahadur, an honorary title bestowed upon him by the British for
his service to the crown.
Layla’s life as a newly married woman takes her
away from home and into the jungles of Assam, where the world’s finest tea
thrives on plantations run by labor and British efficiency. She struggles to find her place among the
prickly English wives with whom she is expected to socialize and the peculiar
servants she now finds herself in charge of.
But navigating the tea garden set will hardly be
her biggest challenge. Layla’s remote
home is not safe from the powerful changes sweeping India on the heels of the
Second World War. Their colonial society
is at a tipping point, and Layla and Manik find themselves caught in a perilous
racial divide that threatens their very lives.
Before marrying Manik, Dadamoshai and Layla had a
housekeeper, Chaya, who was a slim woman with soft brown eyes and a disfiguring
burn scar that fused the skin on the right side of her face like smooth molten
wax. It was an acid burn. When Chaya was sixteen, she had fallen in
love with a Muslim man. The Hindu
villages killed her lover, and then flung acid in her face to mark her as a
social outcast. Dadamoshai had rescued
Chaya from a violent mob and taken her into his custody. What followed was a lengthy and controversial
court case that saw many people go to jail.
Although, Dadamoshai was considered a highly respectable man, this
showed his human nature and the compassionate side of his personality.
Both Layla’s parents had died, which is why she
was living with and being raised by Dadamoshai.
Her father was a freedom fighter and died in the cellular jail. Her mother drowned in a lily pond. She killed herself.
Teatime for the Firefly was a phenomenal story for a debut novel.
It had a little of everything in it:
mystery, suspicion, love, hate, thrills and chills and everything else
you could possibly think of. I’d been
wanting to read this for a while and kept putting it back on my TBR pile and
now I’m sorry I waited so long because this was one well-written, interesting,
and powerful story. Congratulations Ms. Patel on a fantastic debut novel!!!! You deserve a standing ovation!
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