cover image Homework

Homework

Suneeta Peres da Costa, Peres Da Costa. Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, $23.95 (272pp) ISBN 978-1-58234-060-9

This first novel about an Indian family transplanted to Australia introduces a young writer with a gift for humor, irony and tragicomedy and an unusual, sometimes stiflingly inventive way with words. Peres da Costa's irrepressible heroine, Mina Pereira, was born with two ""protuberances, no bigger than finger tips"" on the top of her skull. As she grows, these nodes or feelers heighten and betray Mina's emotional states as she negotiates her way through a series of misadventures. Mina's mother is a palliative physician, caretaker of the terminally ill (""I'd rather die,"" Mina tells the neighbors when they ask her if she would like to pursue the same career). Her father, a tinkerer and dissident, has a printing press in the garage from which he publishes a triannual publication on Goan liberation. Mina's two sisters--Deepa, the eldest, a smug, relentlessly superior genius, and Shanti, the youngest, and the only ""normal"" one, who sits in front of the TV all day watching cartoons--and her friends, a one-eyed neighbor boy named Quentin and Deepa's school friend Jacinta, a vicious terror of mythic proportions, are woven into Mina's poignant and deadpan narration of disasters small and large. Moving from adventures with Sea Monkeys, librarians and violin lessons, Mina gradually brings the dissolution of her parents' lives to center stage, as her father struggles with his wife's deepening manic depression and her contempt for him, and retreats to a hideaway he digs under the house. Though Mina claims to love her mother boundlessly, it is the touching portrait of her father that convinces most. In the end, the little antennae seem an unnecessary device, for Mina's voice--and her own take on her indomitable sisters and her doomed father--propel this talented young Australian's story forward with unconventional wit, energy and depth of feeling. (Sept.)