Leave It to Me

Steve Pitt is a Toronto-based freelance writer and an award-winning journalist. He has written many young adult and children's books, including Day of the Flying Fox: The True Story of World War II Pilot Charley Fox.

Despite having a stable home in Schenectady, New York, and loving
adoptive parents, 23-year-old Debbie has never adjusted to the fact that
she was abandoned by her birth parents. She yearns to uncover her true
origins, but all she can find out from the DiMartinos is that they
adopted her from an Indian orphanage run by nuns and that she is the
daughter of a Californian hippy mother and an Indian father. Debbie’s
image of her biological parents is anything but sentimental. “I owe my
short life to ... lousy people who’d considered me lousier still and
who’d left me to be sniffed at by wild dogs, like a carcass in the
mangy shade.”

Debbie finds herself drawn to the West Coast in search of her long-lost
mother. As she crosses the continent, she transforms herself into Devi
Dee, a young hustler with an affinity for unsavory father figures. Most
of the people Devi Dee meets are a little scary, but then, so is Devi
Dee on occasion. As if in sympathy with the intermittent earth tremors
that punctuate Californian life, all the characters feel that something
big is coming, but none knows when.

Bharati Mukherjee is a master of the cerebral storyline. In Leave It to
Me, she brilliantly weaves a profusion of disparate viewpoints into an
elegant and lucid whole. Less at home in this novel are the action
thriller trappings—guns, cars, and the like. Devi Dee is least
convincing as a character when she wields a weapon other than her own
malice; fortunately, such moments are infrequent.