My rating: 2 of 5 stars
Home is the story of a typical middle-class joint family of cloth merchants living in Delhi.It has all the ingredients of an Ekta Kapoor serial- horrible mother-in-laws, sulking daughter-in-laws, selfish children, pompous relatives ,obscenely lavish weddings and the works. None of the characters were really likeable.And that is not because Manju Kapur paints everyone in shades of Grey;I've liked grey characters before.Home is filled with really boring, vile grey characters that really grate on one's nerves and one doesn't really bother if these characters have a valid reason for being mean after a point.The most irritating among the lot being Sona.
The story might be representative of the middle class , but realism alone is not enough to make one like a book. The writing was very ordinary and the narration extremely jumpy.To be fair to the book,the last hundred-odd pages were infinitely more engaging the the first two hundred. Maybe this had to do with the fact that the story more or less revolved around Nisha's life by this time. I've read Immigrants and A married woman before and found them a lot better than this one. Now I doubt if i'll ever pick up her other book Difficult daughters.
A thoroughly disappointing read!
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