DesiLit Daily

Reviews

"Bodies in Motion is a graceful, nimble book. With great care and affection, Mohanraj finds both beauty and lamentations in the disquieting, but revelatory, clash between custom and assimilation, between everything that came before and all that lies ahead."

-- excerpted from a long review in the Boston Globe, by Renee Graham

"Mohanraj evokes a moving portrait of families searching for love and a place to call home."

-- from Publisher's Weekly

"Bodies in Motion, Mary Anne Mohanraj's debut book, is less a collection of stories than a series of snapshots, a highly colored album of two Sri Lankan families in America. Read separately, the stories are a scattering of random images, raising more questions than they answer. Taken together, glossing and expanding on each other, they create a vivid portrait of families in flux, wandering back and forth over borders both geographic and cultural."

-- excerpted from a long review in the Los Angeles Times, by Janice P. Nimura

"Twenty stories span most of the 20th century and several Sri Lankan families, emphasizing the pangs of exile and the wrench of breaking with tradition....Intricately interwoven stories featuring sensual language and surprising sexual twists."

-- from Kirkus Review

A USA Today Notable Book, July 2005

Picked as one of the summer book recommendations on NPR's Day to Day with Karen Grigsby Bates, who had some really nice things to say about Bodies in Motion including, "This was beautifully written, very nicely done."

"Mohanraj, born in Sri Lanka and educated in the U.S., portrays two Sri Lankan families woven together for several generations by bonds of friendship, marriage, and unsanctioned love affairs. Some emigrate to America or England to complete their education at Oxford, Harvard, or the University of Chicago, the setting of several stories. A few marry whites, some marry other Sri Lankan immigrants, and some return home for traditional arranged marriages, returning to the U.S. to raise their families. Mohanraj perceptively limns her characters with a delicate brush, bringing them slowly to life until the reader knows them well.... -- all come alive in these thoughtful stories of the clash of tradition and modernity, and the search for love in all its various guises."

-- from Booklist

"Dwelling on the thorny inner lives of the characters rather than their predictable conflicts with one other, these stories transcend time and place."

-- excerpted from a review in Time Out New York, by Reena Jana

More Reviews