Ticket to Minto: Stories of India and America (Iowa Short Fiction Award)
Almost all of these stories are first-person accounts of daily events turned slightly unusual, as Fracis utilizes life's minutiae to examine what it means to be simultaneously Indian and American. For Fracis, the struggle is not finding a way to be at once Indian and American. The struggle comes when people want Indian Americans to be one or the other. In "Stray," a young Indian man is fascinated by white women, their pale and pink bodies, while simultaneously dating a young Indian woman whom he knows he would marry if he still lived in Bombay. America wants him to be American, to buy the pale-and-pink definition of beauty, while his family wants him to embrace traditional Indian values. It's a new take on an old conundrum. These stories often lack a clear and consistent narrative voice and tend to end with contrived imagery of closure. Still, there's an audience and a need for books about Indian Americans, and this collection examines issues of racial identity with sensitivity and veracity.John GreenCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved