Friday Finds -- June 18, 2010

Hosted by MizB at Should be reading, this meme asks you what great books did you hear about/discover this past week?

I did not read too many reviews this week, but still came across an awesome bunch of books

Half Life by Roopa Farooki

This is just one of the many South-Asian books I came across this week. I'm not sure if there were indeed more South Asian books spotlighted, or if I just happened to notice, but I definitely enjoyed checking them out. I spotted this one at Laughing Stars.

One brisk Spring day, Aruna just walks out of her East London flat with just a handbag, leaving behind her marriage to Patrick. She gets on a plane to Singapore, to return to the life she ran away from in the first place, back to her childhood friend and lover, Jazz. Aruna knows that running away is easy, having done it once, after Jazz and she failed to make together. It is coming home that is hard.

---

Day for Night by Frederick Reiken

I saw this book so many times lately, but each time I turned away thinking it is not for me. But finally I got convinced enough to add it to my TBR.

As a child, Beverly Rabinowitz fled Europe with her mother during World War II. Almost half a century later, while vacationing in Florida with her boyfriend and his son, a chance encounter leads to a strangely lucid moment in which she senses that her father, long believed to have been killed during the war, is close by. Beverly will soon learn that her story is part of something larger, because her story is not hers alone, but also that of a comatose teenage boy in Utah, an elusive sixties-era fugitive, an FBI agent pursuing a twenty-year obsession, a Massachusetts veterinarian who falls in love on a kibbutz in Israel, and a host of other characters. Day For Night illuminates how disparate, far-flung people can be connected, and how the truth of those bonds can upend entire lives.

---

Escape by Carolyn Jessop

After being fascinated with polygamous experiences via Hidden Wives by Claire Avery, someone suggested this book, which looked good enough to interest me.

Eighteen year old Carolyn Jessop was coerced into an arranged marriage with a total stranger: a man thirty-two years her senior. Merril Jessop already had three wives. But arranged plural marriages were an integral part of Carolyn’s heritage: She was born into and raised in the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS), the radical offshoot of the Mormon Church that had settled in small communities along the Arizona-Utah border. Over the next fifteen years, Carolyn had eight children and withstood her husband’s psychological abuse and the watchful eyes of his other wives who were locked in a constant battle for supremacy. Carolyn was miserable for years and wanted out, but she knew that if she tried to leave and got caught, her children would be taken away from her. No woman in the country had ever escaped from the FLDS and managed to get her children out, too. But in 2003, Carolyn chose freedom over fear and fled her home with her eight children. She had $20 to her name. Not only did she manage a daring escape from a brutal environment, she became the first woman ever granted full custody of her children in a contested suit involving the FLDS.

Check out what others discovered here!