Karma: First Edition

by Cathy Ostlere

Overview

It is 1984, and fifteen-year-old Maya is on her way to India with her father. She carries with her the ashes of her mother, who recently committed suicide, and arrives in Delhi on the eve of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi's assassination.

Maya is separated from her father and must rely upon the mysterious, kindhearted Sandeep to safely reunite them. As her love for Sandeep begins to blossom, Maya must face the truth about her painful adolescence...if she's ever to imagine her future.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781595143846
Publisher:	Penguin Young Readers Group
Publication date:	01/05/2012
Pages:	544
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.20(h) x 1.20(d)
Age Range:	12 - 17 Years

About the Author

Cathy Ostlere (www.cathyostlere.com) is the author of Lost: A Memoir, which was short-listed for the 2009 Edna Staebler Award for Creative Non-Fiction. She lives in Calgary, Alberta. Karma is her first novel for young adults.

Editorial Reviews

Canadian author Ostlere's first novel in verse sweeps across North American and the Indian subcontinent with a force so violent and life altering one might mistake the teen protagonists caught in the vortex of large-scale religious strife and local isolation as slightly sanitized transplants from The Thorn Birds. During the course of about six weeks in late 1984, 15-year-old Maya returns from school in her remote town near Winnipeg to find that her Hindu mother, overwrought by unbearable loneliness, has hanged herself. Maya's father, a Sikh, then decides to travel with Maya and his wife's ashes back to India, from which they had emigrated shortly before Maya's birth because their families would not accept the union of Hindu and Sikh. While in India, Indira Gandhi's assassination at the hands of her Sikh bodyguards sparks a gruesome religious massacre that separates Maya from her father and threatens to orphan her. The narrative, which, to that point, had consisted of Maya's verse diary entries, switches to that of the kind boy, Sandeep, who—in a mere month, mind you—helps Maya emerge from her post-traumatic muteness, assisting her in finding her voice, her father and, surprise: true love. Brimming with mature themes, graphic violence and page-ripping twists of plot, this over-caffeinated loosely based historical saga is for sophisticated teens at best. (Fiction/poetry. 15 & up)

Kirkus Reviews - Kikus Reviews

Canadian author Ostlere's first novel in verse sweeps across North American and the Indian subcontinent with a force so violent and life altering one might mistake the teen protagonists caught in the vortex of large-scale religious strife and local isolation as slightly sanitized transplants from The Thorn Birds. During the course of about six weeks in late 1984, 15-year-old Maya returns from school in her remote town near Winnipeg to find that her Hindu mother, overwrought by unbearable loneliness, has hanged herself. Maya's father, a Sikh, then decides to travel with Maya and his wife's ashes back to India, from which they had emigrated shortly before Maya's birth because their families would not accept the union of Hindu and Sikh. While in India, Indira Gandhi's assassination at the hands of her Sikh bodyguards sparks a gruesome religious massacre that separates Maya from her father and threatens to orphan her. The narrative, which, to that point, had consisted of Maya's verse diary entries, switches to that of the kind boy, Sandeep, who—in a mere month, mind you—helps Maya emerge from her post-traumatic muteness, assisting her in finding her voice, her father and, surprise: true love. Brimming with mature themes, graphic violence and page-ripping twists of plot, this over-caffeinated loosely based historical saga is for sophisticated teens at best. (Fiction/poetry. 15 & up)

Kirkus Reviews