Desirable Daughters

Carol A. Stos is an assistant professor of Spanish Studies at Laurentian
University.

Desirable Daughters is a compelling novel about love and lovers, family
and distance, duty and desire, and the complex relation between the past
and the present. Tara, the narrator, is the youngest of the three
beautiful Bhattacharjee sisters who dutifully marries the entirely
suitable Brahmin boy chosen for her by her parents. They move from India
to San Francisco where he makes his fortune in computers and they
divorce amicably. Tara develops a quirky West Coast lifestyle as a
single mom with a “balding, red-bearded, former biker, former bad-boy,
Hungarian Buddhist contractor/yoga instructor.” She struggles to
reconcile who and where she is now with who she was and is supposed to
be according to tradition, her family’s expectations, and her own
needs and desires. Secrets surfacing from the past bring confusion,
danger, and even murder into the present, and Tara finds herself and all
those she loves in peril. She turns to her sisters and her ex-husband
for help in solving the mystery that threatens them all.

The novel works on many levels. The story of Tara and her sisters is
rooted in their past and in Indian tradition, but at the same time it is
firmly situated in a contemporary world where East and West meet, mix,
and clash. It is a suspense novel that is also a family saga and a
compassionate and thoughtful exploration of how mutable but
frustratingly fixed a woman’s role and sense of self can be. The
threat to Tara and her family is deadly serious, but the absurdities of
life and peculiarities of friends and family offer a rich vein of humor
and ironic commentary. The story leaps through time and distance to
explore the complexities of the human heart. The characters are vividly
wrought, the truth of their lives is stranger than fiction, and
Mukherjee’s evocative prose draws the reader into a reality fraught
with tradition and contradictions. Desirable Daughters is another
excellent work by a deservedly award-winning writer.