Secret Keeper by Mitali Perkins

Secret Keeper by Mitali Perkins This book is about a tomboy named Asha growing up in 1970s India. While Asha’s father is traveling to the US to find a job, Asha, her mother, and older sister go to live with her father’s very traditional relatives in Calcutta. Asha feels stifled by their old-fashioned view of propriety; all she wants to do is go outside and play cricket.

The story is an interesting and realistic glimpse into the lives of a normal Bengali family of this time period. At times, though, I wondered whether this needed to be a historical fiction since I’m sure many people still live with the way Asha’s family does (and the author does also refer to this in the afterword). Perkins’s writing style is modern and fun and I appreciated how the casually used foreign words were not italicized as they are in other books, which I find very off-putting (there is a glossary in the back which I read before I started and didn’t need to look at again). Many readers may be saddened by the ending, but I thought it was a refreshing and realistic choice on the part of the author.

PS I read this on my kindle and the images looked great!

#bookreview #ereader #kindle