Product Description

From the acclaimed author of A Breath of Fresh Air, this beautiful novel takes us to modern India during the height of the summer’s mango season. Heat, passion, and controversy explode as a woman is forced to decide between romance and tradition.

Every young Indian leaving the homeland for the United States is given the following orders by their parents: Don’t eat any cow (It’s still sacred!), don’t go out too much, save (and save, and save) your money, and most important, do not marry a foreigner. Priya Rao left India when she was twenty to study in the U.S., and she’s never been back. Now, seven years later, she’s out of excuses. She has to return and give her family the news: She’s engaged to Nick Collins, a kind, loving American man. It’s going to break their hearts.

Returning to India is an overwhelming experience for Priya. When she was growing up, summer was all about mangoes—ripe, sweet mangoes, bursting with juices that dripped down your chin, hands, and neck. But after years away, she sweats as if she’s never been through an Indian summer before. Everything looks dirtier than she remembered. And things that used to seem natural (a buffalo strolling down a newly laid asphalt road, for example) now feel totally chaotic.

But Priya’s relatives remain the same. Her mother and father insist that it’s time they arranged her marriage to a “nice Indian boy.” Her extended family talks of nothing but marriage—particularly the marriage of her uncle Anand, which still has them reeling. Not only did Anand marry a woman from another Indian state, but he also married for love. Happiness and love are not the point of her grandparents’ or her parents’ union. In her family’s rule book, duty is at the top of the list.

Just as Priya begins to feel she can’t possibly tell her family that she’s engaged to an American, a secret is revealed that leaves her stunned and off-balance. Now she is forced to choose between the love of her family and Nick, the love of her life.

As sharp and intoxicating as sugarcane juice bought fresh from a market cart, The Mango Season is a delightful trip into the heart and soul of both contemporary India and a woman on the edge of a profound life change.


From the Hardcover edition.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #302551 in Books
• Published on: 2004-10-26
• Released on: 2004-10-26
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 272 pages

From Publishers Weekly
All the commonplaces of culture clash are on display in this second novel by Malladi (A Breath of Fresh Air), about an Indian woman who hides her engagement to an American man from her traditional Brahmin family. "I had escaped arranged marriage," begins Priya Rao, "by coming to the United States to do a master's in Computer Sciences at Texas A&M, by conveniently finding a job in Silicon Valley, and then by inventing several excuses to not go to India." At 27, having run out of excuses, she returns to her home city of Hyderabad and runs headlong into a dizzying array of parents, siblings, grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins. Tormenting Priya is a secret: Nick, her American fiance. She is afraid to tell anyone about him, fearing she will be disowned, and even agrees to meet an Indian man her parents would like her to marry. Malladi succeeds in giving a vivid sensory impression of the south of India, its foods and climate and customs, but Priya's family falls neatly into stock types: the overbearing mother who wants Priya to marry within her caste; the hip younger brother who represents the next, Westernized generation of Indians; the catty aunt who constantly criticizes her niece. Awkward prose ("lethargy swirling around her like an irritating mosquito") is a distraction, and melodrama takes the place of nuanced plotting-a final twist is particularly egregious.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From School Library Journal
Adult/High School-Teens will identify with the family dynamics portrayed here, but those from foreign cultures will be most affected by this story of love and family. When she returns to India after seven years, Priya Rao, 27, faces the harsh reality of prejudice and culture clash. Besides religion, caste, and financial status, there is the matter of skin color. Lighter is better, and Priya is considered "dark." Hyderabad seems hotter and dirtier, and her family as intractable as ever, but mango season, the frenetic preparation of pickles and other delicacies from the fruit that ripens in southern India's midsummer, is her favorite time. Ma, a "super nag," quickly makes clear that it is time for her daughter to marry a "nice Indian boy," best of all, a Teluga Brahmin from a family they have chosen, though Priya has veto power once the two have met. How can she tell them that she is engaged to her American lover? She has returned for that purpose, and to reconnect with home and family. [...]
Molly Connally, Chantilly Regional Library, VA
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
At the height of the mango season, 27-year-old Priya returns home to India to the scent of ripened fruits, ready for the family pickling ritual that has been their tradition for as long as she can remember. The sights and scents of India are sensations that Priya has forgotten in her time away, and reacquainting herself with Indian culture soon loses its luster when the family elders begin to question her status as a single woman. They understand that Priya has an illustrious career in California and will probably not stay in India, but they are unaware that she is engaged to an American man who is not Indian and thereby not what they consider a proper husband. While restraint is not part of Priya's rebellious nature, she is stifling her secret for fear of losing the love of family and permanently forging a wedge between the life she dreams of and the legacy of cultural heritage. Malladi submerges the reader in fascinating cultural traditions and rich foods garnished with saucy humor. Elsa Gaztambide
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Customer Reviews

Half-ripe mango
The brightest element of this work is its evocation of the family tradition of extended female members uniting yearly in the laborious process of making mango pickle. However, I found the characters to be either flat characatures of universal types or unevenly developed.

The family "one up-manship" of talent and pride in picking the best mango, in skills related to the process, etc., are the back-biting pecking order innuendos that are perhaps ubiquitous. The mother, however, shows me nothing but rigid thinking. The case isn't clearly made for why this young woman cares so much for her approval or the others' opinions.

Good grief, all they do is put our heroine back in the same slot that she occupied in relationship ten years previously when she had left. Also, the central character swings widely from mature and insightful to petty and needy.

I'd have been much more interested if the author had developed the character of the subserviant "unmarriageable" cousin, "ugly" and in a vulnerable position, whose role is servant and general stray dog that everyone has tacit permission to kick around.

And the coup de grace, the damning period, is the trick ending. good grief. This is closer to Bollywood than any semblance to serious literature.

In fact, it isnt literature; it's fiction gussied up because it's from an Indian writer. This one wasn't ready for prime time. I had hoped that the mango itself would become a central metaphor, and that the character would come to a self revelation from the experience, but alas, her inner conflict, for me, is way underdeveloped and poorly explored.

The Indian-American experience lite
I enjoy seeing the world through fiction, especially by native writers. Compared to the last book about India I read, A Fine Balance (Oprah's Book Club), The Mango Season has the complexity of a comic book. The narrator herself comments that the members of her family are falling into the roles of a "bad Telugu movie".

The narrator, Priya Rao, is a woman from India who has emigrated to the United States and, against all her cultural programming, fallen in love with an is engaged to be married to an American man. The Mango Season is the story of her return to India where she is resolved to break the news to her family.

The Mango Season is a quick read without too much emotional probing of the characters. The author herself is an Indian woman who is married to a Danish man, and perhaps these issues are too personal to her to fully excavate. The Mango Season is most effective when describing the smells and tastes of southern India. The family drama takes place in the context of mango pickling time, when the women of the family put up quarts and quarts of mango pickles (in American terms).

This book would be a great choice for a book club that enjoys multicultural reads but where the members aren't up for the knock-down drag-out emotion of The Poisonwood Bible: A Novel (Perennial Classics).

Amulya's work is wonderful.
I've read all of Amulya's books to date and have been so pleasantly surprised with her ability to write, that I have begun to love reading again. This book does not disappoint... unfortunately, I tend to finish them within two days. :)