Em and the Big Hoom

The Galaxy gals who have read this book have loved this book.  You might, too.

From the inside jacket:  "Meet Imelda and Augustine, or—as our young narrator calls his unusual parents—Em and the Big Hoom. Most of the time, Em smokes endless beedis and sings her way through life. She is the sun around which everyone else orbits. But as enchanting and high-spirited as she can be, when Em’s bipolar disorder seizes her she becomes monstrous, sometimes with calamitous consequences for herself and others. This accomplished debut is graceful and urgent, with a one-of-a-kind voice that will stay with readers long after the last page."

From Kiran Desai, winner of the Man Booker Prize and National Book Critics Circle Fiction Award for The Inheritance of Loss:  "Pinto chases the elusive portrait of a mother who simply said of herself that she was mad.  As I read the novel, that also portrays a very tender marriage and the life of a Goan family in Bombay, it drowned me.  I mean that in the best way.  It plunged me into a world so vivd and capricious, that when I finished, I found something had shifted and changed within myself.  This is a world of magnified and dark emotion.  The anger is a primal force, the sadness wild and raw.  Against this, the jokes are hilarious, reckless, free falling...  This is a rare, brilliant book, one that is wonderfully different from any other that I have read coming out of India."  Or anywhere else I would add.

And finally, from Salman Rushdie:  "A beautiful book... Full of love, pain, and accountably, much wild comedy."