Comforting, sweet, stunning, emotional, validating, heart-warming

The Candid Life of Meena Dave is an exceptionally comforting story of finding your way back to yourself when you feel like you’ve lost who you are. It is an emotional journey of opening yourself up to learning about your heritage when you feel that you’ve had it snatched away from you. It’s a reminder to stop rejecting pieces of yourself and accept who you are. And it is a beautiful lesson that tells us it is never too late to learn how to connect to your heritage so you can always find your way back home.

Quick Summary: Meena lives an independent life as a traveling photojournalist. She’s been all around the world and never stays in one place for long. That is until she is left an apartment in Boston in the will of some woman she has never met. With the explicit intent to check out the apartment so she can figure out how to sell it, Meena finds herself in the apartment immediately falling in love with the legacy and sense of community within the building.

The Candid Life of Meena Dave spoke directly to my soul. Just like me, Meena grew up with parents who did not understand her heritage which meant that she didn’t have anyone to help her navigate her heritage growing up. From personal experience, this is an incredibly complex experience to have and Patel navigates Meena’s experience wonderfully. It comes with a lot of rejection of one’s self and reading about Meena taking a stand and reclaiming those pieces of her in adulthood touched my heart and made me cry.

This novel centers around the Engineer’s House and it is something incredibly special. At the heart of it is a small community of families who are stronger together. The house is a co-operative living family, meaning that when Meena is thrown in the middle, she suddenly gets aunties of her own. Right in the same building. It is beautiful to see the ways that people come together to support one another in an unknown place with an unknown future. Even more stunning is the way that the Engineer’s House is holding onto that legacy in modern day. The Candid Life of Meena Dave reminds us that we are only as strong as our communities and how strong we can be when we build them right.



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