Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #233018 in Books
• Published on: 2007-06-28
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 288 pages

Review
Excruciating ordeal of a math prodigy pressured by her father to enter Oxford.Rumi is the daughter of Shreene and Mahesh Vasi, Indian immigrants to Cardiff, Wales. Ever since her first elementary-school teacher heralded Rumi's gift for mathematics, Mahesh, a lecturer at the University of Wales, has been grooming his child for academic stardom. After a perceived snub by the local Mensa chapter, Mahesh designs a grueling study schedule for Rumi that occupies all her free time and enhances her isolation from her "normal" peers. As she crams for her college entrance exams - while a freshman in high school - Rumi, unbeknownst to her traditionalist parents, nurses some teenage crushes and accompanying heartaches. First there's Bridgeman, a chess-club and stamp-collecting geek, who undergoes a growth and "cool" spurt seemingly overnight. During a trip to India, a Bollywood-handsome cousin flirts with her by night then, for fear of his own parents, ignores her by day. Rumi's enforced regime causes her to develop some compensatory tics. As a child, she shoplifts sweets. As a teenager, she devours epic quantities of cumin seeds. But mostly her interior life is a seething cauldron of hormones and humiliation. Her developing puberty is viewed with alarm by her parents, who won't tolerate premarital friendships with boys. Nevertheless, Mahesh thrusts Rumi into the sophisticated, diverse ambience of Oxford, if only for two days a week, under the chaperonage of an Indian landlady. Her math diligence derailed by her longing for masculine attention, Rumi sneaks out of a child-prodigy convention to attend a campus party where she encounters Fareed. Their mutual infatuation screeches to a halt when Fareed learns, through the plentiful press on Rumi, that she's only 15. But when Mahesh, whose family was devastated by Muslim violence during Partition, finds Rumi's love notes to a Muslim, his roles as mentor and Hindu paterfamilias collide, risking the violent sundering of his own fragile hearth.Lalwani's impressive debut exhibits deep empathy for her characters' cultural and emotional displacements. (Kirkus Reviews)

The Bookseller
'A winner ... This much heralded novel turns out to be worth the
fuss. It is observant, witty, and stylistically original'

Stephen Merchant
`Beautiful, brilliant . . . Unveils the grand emotions and tiny
details of other people's lives with insight, compassion, humour and
heartbreaking honesty'

Customer Reviews

A brave but uneven attempt
This is a brave book with good intent but very unevenly written.

The premise - about a mathematics prodigy, and her relationship with her family - is interesting. Yes, I want to know what goes on in such families and what the dynamics are. What makes it more interesting is that the family in question is an Indian family trying to find its way in Britain so they are different in more ways than one and the `immigrant theme' gives added texture (although the family's trip to India half way through the book seems like a tangent).

The best part of the book is the final chapters, with the girl prodigy Rumi cracking up and running away, and the complete incomprehension of her family. It works well. But the rest is very patchy. We do not really get how controlling the father is. The character of the mother is only sketchily drawn. So much more could have been done with the characters of the parents who are key in this tale.

There is unevenness in Rumi's own psychological portrayal, and often I do not find her convincing. Sometimes she seems older, sometimes younger.

Although the book is easy to read and moves on at a good pace, the dialogue is often clunky, the prose can be stilted. And the narrative tense inexplicably moves from past to present tense which does not help. I was particularly irritated by the forced metaphors and stilted similes. Like: "his heart, which was softening like a marshmallow on a fire..." The time Rumi spends on computer games was described as "time that had a special currency of its own, like chocolate coins wrapped in gold foil". Dreadful.

The story of the girl maths prodigy that made to Oxford and then ran away was a big story in the newspapers some years back, and yes, the parents were portrayed as pushy and controlling so I kind of knew what was going to happen. I was interested in Nikita Lalwani's interpretation, but somehow she did not really enlighten me as I had been hoping.

It's really odd that this book made the Booker longlist. Nikita Lalwani may go on to write better books, but this one is definitely not `Booker' class.

Nicely written, story could be better
'Gifted' is the story of a young Indian family living in Cardiff, whose lives revolve around their ambitions for daughter Rumi, a teenage maths prodigy. It's nicely written with an elegant turn of phrase, but in terms of plot it could do with some work.

The first half of the book was better than the second. Quite a promising story builds up, and it's a good topic to write about. The family's efforts to assimilate into the UK are really well written and I felt it gave me a real insight into the daily dilemnas for an Indian family living in the UK. However, in the third part the story somehow peters out. Events seemed to run away with themselves and plausibility was lost. There were too many loose and ends and the end was inconclusive and disappointing.

There is real potential here for some very emotive writing yet it didn't quite move me in the way I had hoped. Rumi's various romantic dalliances were rather contrived and I found it hard to believe in some of the events. Too much was unexplained, like how Rumi was allowed to (apparently) give up all other school subjects in favour of maths, why no one at the school considered the possibility she was being pushed too hard, and how not only her father but half the country seemed to find out about her meeting with a boy in Oxford.

In terms of chracters, mother Shreene is probably the most interesting and complex, and I felt that she brought alive the difficulties of trying to adjust to a different culture whilst not losing a sense of your own identity. Rumi was sympathetic and likable, but it wasn't as easy to empathise with her as it might have been. Totalitarian father Mahesh is rather stereotypical and the sections which attempt to explain his behaviour don't add anything. Peripheral characters are very underdeveloped and sketchy, which is a shame.

All in all, it was worth reading and I would read another book by the same author. It's just a bit unpolished, in terms of the story itself rather than the writing, and I'm sure this will improve in subsequent novels.

Fascinating premise, but muddled and disjointed
I expected to like this book. I had read promising reviews and the premise sounded - and is - interesting. However, I felt it was let down by the writing, which I found muddled and long-winded.

The story: Rumi is the only daughter of Indian immigrants living in Wales. On her first day at school, the teacher identifies her as being exceptionally bright and recommends that she join Mensa. Instead her father, Mahesh, decides that he can guide her to develop her fullest potential and so Rumi embarks on a rigorous program of study with few diversions allowed. As she grows older and starts to get interested in boys and popular culture, she increasingly chafes at the constraints put on her - not just by her father, but by teachers, journalists and others who all seem to have a view on how this "gift" of her extreme intelligence should be utilized.

When I read, I like to be involved with at least one character in the book. I don't always have to like them or approve of what they do, but I do need to at least care what happens to them. I admired how Lalwani shows us Rumi's view of the world (everything is a math equation), but I didn't particularly care about any of these characters and I actively disliked the father. The book felt disjointed, as if Lalwani was trying to cover too many bases. Also, the writing alternated between the present and past tense, for reasons that I could not understand.

I'm really surprised that this book made the Booker long list. I think the idea behind the novel is very interesting, but Lalwani failed to deliver on it. I almost gave up on it, but I kept reading and I'm glad that I did because it picks up towards the ending when Rumi hits her teens. Even though I found it flawed, it would be a good choice for a book club as there is a lot to discuss about family relationships, the experience of immigrants, and the importance that our society places on intelligence.