I really, really wanted to like this book, but it was so disjointed that I could not read it. One minute, two former girlfriends aren't talking for years, the next they are fooling around? It felt out of place and weird. I stopped reading.

We worship the idea of freedom and independence in the USA. I struggled in my young life because I wanted total independence and freedom from the time I was just a kid. I came from a family who placed religion combined with an old European culture above everything else. Making the family look good was paramount and more important than my happiness or well being.

Lucky, Lakshmi's nickname, has zero freedom as she was born into a traditional Sri Lankan family. The belief that all babies are born with their fate invisibly inscribed on the top of their heads sums up the experience of life in Lucky's culture. This invisible fate reinforces the beliefs that bind Lucky to a husband that is for the sake of appearance only. Lucky and her husband, Krishna, are gay. They get their freedom through the marriage. Lucky can live away from home and Kris gets a visa so he doesn't have to return to India. The couple are best friends and the arrangement works up to a point.

Lucky's mother is rarely happy with any of Lucky's accomplishments. When Lucky has to return home to help her mother care for the grandmother, her world starts closing in on her. Her restricted life is suffocating and making her miserable. Loyalty to her family, even her father who humiliated her mother with a divorce, makes Lucky's life a living hell. The restrictions are painful and I felt them with her, every one of them. An obvious solution to the prison that is this kind of life has already been done by her sister, Vidaya who left home and has not returned. The family has no idea where she is, only that she loved a man named Jamal and he could not be accepted into the family's sphere of acceptability.

This is a novel detailing the life of many in the LGBTQ community with the added weight of a traditional culture with expectations and taboos going back thousands of years. S. J. Sindhu has written a deeply touching and painful story. It is a new voice for detailing the tapestry of lives that deserve to be recognized and loved for who they are.

ARC received courtesy of NetGalley and Soho Press (June 13th 2017).

This is an excellent novel focused on a lesbian struggling to live with her family while concealing an identity they don't approve of. Lucky disagrees with her given name, which means beauty and wealthy, and is unsure of how to present herself without offending the values she was raised under. SJ Sindu did a great job of portraying this difficulty and of giving Lucky depth throughout the story.

While I appreciated the look into a life very unlike my own, I was incredibly disappointed because the story seemed so disjointed. Even knowing how it would most likely end, I was still annoyed. It was interesting, but ultimately unsatisfying.