cover image The Body Myth

The Body Myth

Rheea Mukherjee. Unnamed, $16.99 trade paper (240p) ISBN 978-1-944700-84-3

Mukherjee’s flawed debut follows Mira, a young, recently widowed teacher in the fictional Indian city of Suryam. Since her husband’s death in a car accident a few years prior, Mira has retreated from the world, occupying herself with a stoic dedication to teaching, her aging father, and the works of Western philosophers. Her self-imposed exile ends when she chances on Sara and Rahil, a young married couple, as Sara suffers a seizure in the park. She is soon drawn into their orbit, becoming lover to both Sara—a hypochondriac and New Age spiritualist—and her caretaker husband, an arrangement that sets Mira on the road to true recovery. The arrangement is more or less frictionless, and Mukherjee’s story suffers for it; when the trio finally split, it feels perfunctory and absent of real conflict. Though the characters, especially Mira, are drawn with rich motivations and passions, the novel comes short of making them fully realized, as emotional development tends to occur off the page. At its best, Mukherjee’s novel encapsulates the heady breathlessness of falling in love; at its worst, it has the consequence-free, exaggerated feel of a soap opera.[em] (Feb.) [/em]