Unaccustomed Earth

I saw this book on several "best" lists from last year so I picked it up without any idea what it was about at all. Turns out it's a collection of short stories mainly featuring Bengali Indians and the Americans who interact with them. The stories are all focused around personal stories of changing relationships - between children and parents, between spouses, between families. The author has a descriptive and evocative but very readable writing style, bringing out little important details that make the feel of these lives and households seem very real. Most of the stories are stand-alones but the characters in the last three are interconnected and cover a passage of time from childhood to marriage through the eyes of two different characters. All of the stories are interesting to read but overall left me with a slightly bleak feeling as if the author is illustrating that nobody is ever completely happy and happiness is always fleeting - probably true, of course.

Overall it was an interesting read and the author is a good writer, but the themes were so narrow and repetitive in many ways (immigration, relationships, family, same races and classes of people usually even in the same settings) that I didn't find it as interesting as, say, a Margaret Atwood collection where you really never know what's going to happen next or where the next story will take you. (Also, probably since I am in neither Bengali or American, perhaps I didn't identify all that much with the settings.)