Take a photo of a barcode or cover
rashellnicole 's review for:
Goddess of the River
by Vaishnavi Patel
challenging
emotional
informative
reflective
sad
tense
medium-paced
Thank you to Edelweiss and Redhook for letting me read an e-ARC of Goddess of the River by Vaishnavi Patel! This book releases on May 21st, so you have just enough time to preorder a copy or request it from your local library to celebrate. If you read Patel’s debut novel, Kaikeyi, and loved it - you’ll want to get your hands on this one!
Let me start by saying that this was my first encounter with the contents of the Mahabharata, so I had no prior knowledge of the subject matter, stories, and deities within this book or its original source material. Patel, however, does an amazing job of arranging her retellings of Indian myths and legends with great care and research that shines through her finished texts. For any portion of the storytelling that I found tricky to keep up with (multiple names and titles, timelines, knowledge of Indian mythos), I still found it easy enough to piece together the narrative and comprehend the big picture story by its conclusion. Similar to Kaikeyi, Goddess of the River explores motherhood, the struggle of dharma, war, and the concept of family by introducing fantastical elements (the river Ganga’s powers in her immortal form) and by holding up a magnifying glass to a few threads in the massive tapestry that is the Mahabharata.
We follow the river Ganga as she is cursed to take on a mortal form, and bear 7 children and release them to the immortal realm before she can return to her immortal river state. She successfully weds the raja, Shantanu, and bears 6 children (returning them to her river with increasing sadness and grief), but fails to release her 7th and final child back to where he belongs. Having fulfilled the terms of the curse (bearing 7 children), she becomes the river Ganga once more, but is now forced to watch her son, Devavrata, grow up from afar. Tragedy ensues over the coming decades as her son refuses the throne and sends the kingdom into a whirlwind as the family decides who should be heir, if not him. Family in-fighting begins and it all goes downhill from there, as the predicted war comes to pass by the end.
Don’t forget to check The StoryGraph for content warnings, though Patel also includes this.
Let me start by saying that this was my first encounter with the contents of the Mahabharata, so I had no prior knowledge of the subject matter, stories, and deities within this book or its original source material. Patel, however, does an amazing job of arranging her retellings of Indian myths and legends with great care and research that shines through her finished texts. For any portion of the storytelling that I found tricky to keep up with (multiple names and titles, timelines, knowledge of Indian mythos), I still found it easy enough to piece together the narrative and comprehend the big picture story by its conclusion. Similar to Kaikeyi, Goddess of the River explores motherhood, the struggle of dharma, war, and the concept of family by introducing fantastical elements (the river Ganga’s powers in her immortal form) and by holding up a magnifying glass to a few threads in the massive tapestry that is the Mahabharata.
We follow the river Ganga as she is cursed to take on a mortal form, and bear 7 children and release them to the immortal realm before she can return to her immortal river state. She successfully weds the raja, Shantanu, and bears 6 children (returning them to her river with increasing sadness and grief), but fails to release her 7th and final child back to where he belongs. Having fulfilled the terms of the curse (bearing 7 children), she becomes the river Ganga once more, but is now forced to watch her son, Devavrata, grow up from afar. Tragedy ensues over the coming decades as her son refuses the throne and sends the kingdom into a whirlwind as the family decides who should be heir, if not him. Family in-fighting begins and it all goes downhill from there, as the predicted war comes to pass by the end.
Don’t forget to check The StoryGraph for content warnings, though Patel also includes this.