Inheritance Book

Characters leap off the pages and into our hearts. . . . Ganesan crafts her work with such a gracefully light touch that readers leave the book with the sense of having just experienced something exquisitely fine. -Joan Hinkemeyer, Rocky Mountain News

Inheritance is a gracefully wrought novel centering on the emotional awakening of Sonil, a fifteen-year-old girl living with her aunts in India. Overcome by a lingering illness, she travels to the mythic island of Pi to recover under the care of her beloved grandmother. In this lush Arcadian space, boundaries between what is real and what is not diminish, and Sonil begins to discover who she is. Rejected by her emotionally distant mother and searching desperately for any information about her American father, she seeks solace in an affair with an American man twice her age. It is through that relationship of love and loss that she begins to understand and forgive her mother, realizing for the first time what she has inherited and what she must forge for herself.

School Library Journal

YA-In this coming-of-age novel set in India, 15-year-old Sonil spends the summer at her adored grandmother's home on a lush island off the subcontinent's coast. There, she meets her distant, enigmatic mother, who sent her away when she was a baby to live with her aunts on the mainland. Sonil yearns to know why and who her American father might be. Ganesan's lithe and sensuous tale follows Sonil as she spends languid days with her great-uncle, talks about boys with her favorite cousin, and spies on her mysteriously remote and silent mother. She is angered by the woman's frequent evening absences from the house and her refusal to talk to her. It is only through her passionate relationship with an American twice her age whom she meets in the marketplace that she is able to begin to understand and forgive her mother. Toward the end of the novel, Sonil says, "I had thought that inheritance was inescapable. It is, but not in the ways I imagined....I am a random mix of genes and attributes. I do not have to be like my mother...yet a shard of her exists in everything I do." Inheritance deals with universal dramas of love and loss, family and acceptance. It should reassure young adults that the idiosyncrasies and eccentricities of families and the need to accept them cross many cultures.-Pat Bangs, Fairfax County Public Library, VA