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Liked It “this book was quite hard to get into, and i nearly gave up. Many characters introduced and it was confusing. However, I stuck with it and by the end was very glad I did.....” see full review » see other reviews » |
Didn’t Like It “The beginning of the novel was unnecessarily choppy and hard to follow. I thought the concept of wish making should have been developed more. The ending was abrupt and a little disappointing.” see full review » see other reviews » |
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“The beginning of the novel was unnecessarily choppy and hard to follow. I thought the concept of wish making should have been developed more. The ending was abrupt and a little disappointing. ”
Angela O wrote this review Wednesday, November 18 2009. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No“this book was quite hard to get into, and i nearly gave up. Many characters introduced and it was confusing. However, I stuck with it and by the end was very glad I did.....”
melissa s wrote this review Thursday, October 29 2009. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No“I have a penchant for picking up famous titles. Of course, when I actually pick them up, I vaguely remember that the books are famous for some reason. The only reason is perhaps that publishing houses are rather active nowadays in splashing the name and author of a new book before it’s out in the market. So that’s how I ended up picking up this book. I was also in for a pleasant surprise when I discovered that the author was a Pakistani and not an Indian Muslim as I had assumed. I have always been eager to try and discover cultural nuances and similarities among our geographical neighbours and I feel that books are one small way towards achieving this goal.
Ana Roiter wrote this review Sunday, October 25 2009. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No
Ali Sethi is a young writer albeit an experienced one. Of course in my opinion, some writers have inborn talent and the remaining few manage to reach desired levels after years of cultivation of the habit. It’s difficult to compartmentalize Sethi in such specific divisions but he has the sparks of talent.
The protagonist Zaki Shirazi is perhaps the only male character in spotlight and in the entire duration of story telling, he even appears dwarfed by the female characters around him; his mother Zakia, Daadi (paternal grandmother), cousin Samar Api and servant Naseem.
People usually have this wrong notion that working women are the only ones who exert their personality and housewives are an example of docility. None of Zaki’s women, who are housewives (except for his mother) really rebel against tradition but they are firm in asserting their own rights wherever required. Whether it is Daadi refusing to stay with her wily mother-in-law, Samar exerting herself in her relationship or the servant Naseem who manages to buy a wagon for her son or wangle a trip to Mecca, these women refuses to be bullied by life. However, Zaki’s mother is the real heroine. And as according to the author’s extracted quotation of the Prophet, Paradise lies at the feet of the mother.
Taking difficult decisions on her own, bringing up Zaki as a single parent, and running a progressive women’s magazine, she might also be expected to impart a similar liveliness to her son as well. And this is probably where Sethi disappoints. Zaki doesn’t seem to have a definite personality as expected from a protagonist. Instead he absorbs life’s nuances as they come upon him, unlike his female relatives who fight their way out. This might also be an extension of Sethi’s view of preferred male behaviour where according to Zaki’s Urdu poetry spouting teacher, the men should know their place and observe modesty just as the women should. And this tone runs throughout the entire story.
Another peculiarity of The Wish Maker is that Sethi mentions a lot of big events – the India-Pakistan partition, different elections and regimes in Pakistan but he just touches upon them. One can know little of the impact of these life-changing events on the story’s characters because even they comment very little on them. The best part of the book is the way different time-periods are interspersed and almost glide towards completing the whole story ; and of course the climactic last line ” ..your Amitabh has arrived”.
Overall it is a nice read but somehow I still feel I didn’t learn much about the Pakistani culture, or is it my biased mindset which expects a whale of differences between the two countries that probably are still as similar as they were before the night of 15 August 1947.
http://anaroiter.blogspot.com/2009/10/wish-maker-by-ali-sethi.html”“I picked up this book after the gist of the book and looking forward to enjoy this one penned by a Pakistani author.”
dasholime wrote this review Wednesday, September 16 2009. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No
“A third of the way through this book I realized that I didn't care about the characters or what they were doing ... good reason to bring it back to the library.”
Patti Q wrote this review Thursday, August 20 2009. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No
“slow start but interesting story of pakistan between two cousins.”
Betsey B wrote this review Thursday, August 20 2009. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No
“very difficult to read with odd phrasing, words and sentence structure and got boring in places - the occasional poetic bit of writing and wanting to know the fate of seema rescued it for me”
sue c wrote this review Thursday, August 6 2009. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No
“This gets off to a slow start, but once it gets going it is a charming story about a Pakistanian boy and his relationship with his female cousin mixed in with the politics of the last 40 years. ”
Melanie I wrote this review Monday, July 13 2009. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No
“This is definitely a beautifully written and complex story, giving the average American reader a glimpse into modern-day Pakistan through the eyes of several family members, all interconnected in their trusts and mistrusts, losses and loves. That being said, I found the format distracting, often getting confused by the sudden jump in time within one conversation. I guess it was set up to be like someone telling you about their memories, and how it's easy to switch from one point in a story to another point at a distinctly different time, but I didn't think it conveyed as well in the narrative. I enjoyed the beauty of the language and the vividness of the details, but it did take a while for me to become invested in the story.”
Dawn M wrote this review Tuesday, July 7 2009. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No
“Docile Zaki and beautiful Samar. Cousins in Pakistan, living together in the home of Zaki's grandmother and mother. Zaki lives in this woman's world, growing up as a modern Pakistan emerges. The political situation is active yet tenuous and Zaki's mother's involvement is seen through the eyes of the young and provide a unique perspective of Pakistan during the era of Pakistan's first and only female prime minister, Benazir Bhutto.
sheelysmom wrote this review Saturday, June 6 2009. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No
The politics and religious life of Pakistanis are a constant backdrop throughout this multi generational story. The life of our protagonist Zaki is mingled with the stories of his mother, grandmother, great-auntie and father. While I liked the different view of Pakistan that these tangents presented, I sometimes felt that the transitions between the present and the past and back again were sudden and choppy. They also made the plot move forward slowly for me, which isn't always a bad thing but sometimes I got bogged down. It took me a long time to finish because it took me so long to get engaged enough to want to pick it up. I will say, however, that these views added depth to my knowledge of not just the members of his family (and why they made the choices they did), but also of Pakistani history, capturing the experiences of many different types of people.
Despite the slowness of the pace, this book is beautifully written. Sethi has a strong sense of aesthetics and lyricism. Small expressions would so perfectly capture an emotion or an action. Instead of saying, for example, that two women sat down to catch up, Sethi says, "They sat in the garden...pouring from vats of recently acquired experience." I love that image! He was also surprisingly good at knowing how teenage girls would respond or act in certain situations - I believed his character's behavior, even when I didn't like it. I felt like the relationship between the cousins could have been more fleshed out, but I still liked the idea of their closeness.
The Wish Maker is a coming of age story. A story of wishes and lost dreams and of a boy and his a country on the brink of finding themselves. ”
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