Summary- East and West may meet, but sometimes they shouldn’t. That’s what Nisha Desai’s conservative Hindu family thinks when a black-sheep American aunt and her trouble-magnet teenage daughters come to visit them in India. The guests are seen as an invading force, equipped with weapons of mass corruption.
But to Nisha, the rich aunt looks like a one-woman foreign aid program and a way to escape the horrible suitors her father keeps foisting on her. She makes every effort to charm the visitors. This is not an easy task, for the aunt is a New Age space case, and the cousins’ appetite for disasters threatens to level the city of Ahmedabad. In short order, the demented cousins instigate an elopement, a public protest, and a riot that gets Nisha thrown in jail.
It’s only when Nisha’s father adopts a pet cow and convinces half the city it’s the reincarnation of a Hindu deity that the two families are united in a common goal: to bilk thousands. The result is Madison Avenue’s idea of a religious experience, which is not a controllable situation.
My Rating-
My Review- This was a hilarious and insightful look into another cultures traditions. You immediately fall in love with the two sisters and their funny and sardonic way of dealing with cultural and family traditions. The story moves at a pretty quick pace but not so fast you get lost. It’s a funny and unexpected roller coaster ride through the book and I’m glad I took the time to read it.