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Booklist. 8/01/2005
Brown, Rachel Manija. All the Fishes Come Home to Roost: An American
Misfit in India. Oct. 2005. 350p. Rodale, $23.95 (1-59486-139-0).
915.404.
Like humorists Augusten Burroughs and David Sedaris, Brown taps into
the terrain of her unusual—and, at times, unsettling—childhood for
this engaging debut. In the early 1980s, seven-year-old Brown, a
self-described misfit whose nose was forever poked in a book, was
towed by her hippie parents to Ahmednagar, India, home to followers of
the late Meher Baba. (The longtime guru to rock singer Pete Townsend,
Baba is also credited with the cloying quote, "Don't worry, be
happy.") As the sole foreign child in a backwater town, young Brown's
encounters ranged from curious to chilling: beatific disciples, kooky
pilgrims, and mean-spirited classmates who hurled rocks at her. Brown,
now an award-winning television writer and playwright in Los Angeles,
intermittently flashes forward to document her life after escaping the
ashram at the age of 12, a narrative strategy that slows the pace of
the book. But her mordant accounts of her Baba-worshipping mother and
daily life in India (from its blistering heat and belligerent bugs to
taxi drivers who clean their windshields with baked potatoes)
enlighten and delight. —Allison Block
YA: A realistic view of coming-of-age in the counterculture. BO.
Brown, Rachel Manija. All the Fishes Come Home to Roost: An American
Misfit in India. Oct. 2005. 350p. Rodale, $23.95 (1-59486-139-0).
915.404.
Like humorists Augusten Burroughs and David Sedaris, Brown taps into
the terrain of her unusual—and, at times, unsettling—childhood for
this engaging debut. In the early 1980s, seven-year-old Brown, a
self-described misfit whose nose was forever poked in a book, was
towed by her hippie parents to Ahmednagar, India, home to followers of
the late Meher Baba. (The longtime guru to rock singer Pete Townsend,
Baba is also credited with the cloying quote, "Don't worry, be
happy.") As the sole foreign child in a backwater town, young Brown's
encounters ranged from curious to chilling: beatific disciples, kooky
pilgrims, and mean-spirited classmates who hurled rocks at her. Brown,
now an award-winning television writer and playwright in Los Angeles,
intermittently flashes forward to document her life after escaping the
ashram at the age of 12, a narrative strategy that slows the pace of
the book. But her mordant accounts of her Baba-worshipping mother and
daily life in India (from its blistering heat and belligerent bugs to
taxi drivers who clean their windshields with baked potatoes)
enlighten and delight. —Allison Block
YA: A realistic view of coming-of-age in the counterculture. BO.