Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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34 of 39 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A novel of great power and enormous anger, 15 Aug 2007
Gifted is a novel of great power and enormous anger.
As the title suggests, the novel centres around a young girl, Rumi, who is found to have a gift for maths. Her parents - particularly her frightening father - decide the gift must be nurtured at all costs.
There are three principal characters, Rumi and her parents, Mahesh and Shreene. As a father figure, Mahesh would not have been out of place in Victorian Britain. He is strong, pious, bullying and hypocritical. Having inveigled his wife, Shreene, to follow him to Wales from India to make a better life, he sets about rejecting western values whilst enjoying them to the full. He prohibits his wife, an educated woman, from flourishing and exerts a huge degree of control on her time. Whilst this makes Shreene initially angry, she eventually seems to adopt the same values as Mahesh in order to make it appear as though she is in control o her destiny.
Then, when Rumi's gift is discovered, Mahesh finds a new opportunity to exert his control. Rumi's life ceases to be her own - a tight regime of libraries, study, discipline and obedience are imposed. Rumi tries to find small outlets for her individuality, sneakily reading fiction and pilfering sweets, but the brutality of her father constantly wins through. All Rumi can do is dream of outgrowing the nest and making an early journey away to university. Obviously, with her "gifts", Rumi finds a degree of celebrity which is not always helpful, particularly given her destiny to be younger and less mature than her peers. Both in Cardiff and in Oxford, she is something of a lab rat - expected to be a second Ruth Lawrence - but is at heart a likeable and ordinary girl.
The characterization is superb. The three principal characters strike so many chords. People like Rumi, Mahesh and Shreene exist - and not just within the Indian community. The novel is a caution on the results of trying to live your life through your offspring. It is a caution about attaching undue value and focus to a small part of a person. It makes one question the benefit of unbidden "gifts" that turn out to be white elephants. It also makes one wonder about the role of bystanders who are prepared to witness such appalling abuse without questioning it, just because it happens within the middle classes.
The level of hate that Rumi feels towards her parents - and especially Mahesh - just drips from the page. Rumi seldom says - even dares to think - harsh thoughts of them but the simmering, deep hatred is inescapable. Throughout the novel, one wills her to break free and realize her potential. At the end, one is left with envious admiration for her courage in daring to do what so many of us have wanted to do. But as to whether she has succeeded in breaking free, the reader is left to guess.
It was interesting to see in the acknowledgements at the end that Nikita Lalwani seems to have good relations with her own parents. She claims the work was inspired by Vik Sharma, presumably a friend or partner. To have produced a work so vivid through only vicarious experience is a wonder.
This is a work of immense power that will stay with me for a long time.
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31 of 39 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Touching, funny, beautiful, wonderful, 28 Jun 2007
I absolutely loved this book - a beautifully written and endearingly funny take on coming-of-age, finding your way in a foriegn land, and love. It grabs you right from the start...the central Vasi family is intricate and all emotions are double-edged - nothing is simple, everything is real.
Lalwani wondefully captures the essence of a girl growing up and falling in love...battling between nerdiness and celebrity, between being an outsider and being accepted. The book is full of humour, but without leaving out the harsh and difficult points that define childhoods.
This book is about a young, asian, gifted girl growing up in wales - but as an old, white, unremarkable man in england, i couldn't put it down. Brilliant.
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6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A "gifted" debut, 2 Oct 2007
I have to say if I had seen this book in the shops I probably wouldn't have picked it up. The cover is really quite awful, and effectively pigeon-holes it straight away as another Brick Lane/White Teeth. But, while there are obviously parallels with those two very successful books (Asian characters in the UK; the difficulties of trying to live by two different cultures at the same time), Gifted is much more than EthniLit By Numbers.
It is the story of Rumi Vasi and her family. Her parents are from India, and moved to Cardiff for a better life before Rumi was born. When Rumi is around 10 it is discovered that she is a gifted child in Maths, and her severe father Mahesh decides that to "nurture" this gift she must be subjected to a rigorous regime of study so that she can become another Ruth Lawrence, and go to Oxford early. And so the struggle begins. While Rumi is exceptionally talented at Maths, she is also just a normal girl growing up in the 1980s. She is curious about boys, about make-up, music, and making friends with people her own age. But Mahesh has her on a tight leash, and even stops her from playing with her little brother because she should be concentrating on her study rather than playing "children's" games.
Essentially this is a coming-of-age novel, but Nikita Lalwani tells it with compassion and power. The resentment that Rumi grows to feel towards her parents (her mother Shreene feels she has to back up Mahesh though he has effectively suppressed her ever since their marriage - she is an university-educated woman now forced to work in a mere administrative capacity for "propriety's" sake despite it being clear she could become so much more if she were given the chance to flourish) and the resentment she ultimately comes to feel towards Maths itself is wonderfully evocative. Any book that has me muttering under my breath at the characters wins my vote!
But I wanted to know so much more about Mahesh and Shreene! I wanted there to be more of a exploration of the irony that while Shreene's education has been suppressed by Mahesh, Rumi's has been put under a microscope, and concentrated. I felt at times that Mahesh was slightly caricature-like, and even a little cardboard. The ending felt ever-so-slightly rushed, though I was happy with what the ending was in itself. I just felt it could have been explored a little more.
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