Woven into the story of the children’s lives are the politics of caste and social hierarchies and aspirations, parental ambitions, marital disappointments, teenage love and heartbreak, and the differences-those expressed politely by dignified and proud heads of families rather than those likely to set households ablaze-between Tamil and Sinhala people. The story begins in the childhood of the narrator’s parents-Nishan and Visaka. But what it does achieve, and quite remarkably so, is an idyllic, near-perfect picture of the island, beaded together from the childhood nostalgia of generations. Nayomi Munaweera’s debut novel attempts to transcend a little more than 60 years of history-the violent and strife-torn decades of post-colonial Sri Lanka-through three generations of two families.What it fails to entirely achieve is historical perspective-not everyone is well acquainted with the origins and details of the Tamil-Sinhala conflict.
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