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Book | Searching... North Andover - Stevens Memorial Library | F SATHIAN | 31478010167782 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Andover - Memorial Hall Library | FICTION SATHIAN | 31330009011341 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Andover - Memorial Hall Library | BOOK CLUB / SATHIAN | 31330009225180 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Billerica Public Library | FICTION/SATHIAN | 33934004397650 | Searching... Unknown |
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Book | Searching... Carlisle - Gleason Public Library | F SATHIAN | 32117002064412 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Chelmsford Public Library | FIC/SATHIAN | 31480011454797 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Essex - T.O.H.P. Burnham Free Library | F SAT | 32119000415901 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Georgetown Peabody Library | FIC SATHIAN | 32120001341948 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Groveland - Langley-Adams Library | FIC SATHIAN | 32121000882312 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Hamilton-Wenham Public Library | FIC SATHIAN | 30470001895522 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Haverhill Public Library | FIC/SATHIAN S | 31479007448631 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Ipswich Public Library | FIC SATHIAN, SANJENA | 32122002833691 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Lawrence Public Library | FIC SAT | 31549004844188 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Lowell - Pollard Memorial Library | FIC SATHIAN | 31481005511857 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Manchester-by-the-Sea Public Library | FIC SAT | 32124001965953 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Merrimac Public Library | F SAT | 32125001421111 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Methuen - Nevins Memorial Library | FIC SAT | 31548003337301 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Middleton - Flint Public Library | F SATHIAN | 32126001790984 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Newburyport Public Library | FIC SATHIAN S | 32128003905412 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... North Reading - Flint Memorial Library | FIC SATHIAN, S. | 31550002417332 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Rockport Public Library | FIC SATHIAN | 32129002440179 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Rowley Public Library | FIC SAT | 32130000982469 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Tewksbury Public Library | FICTION SATHIAN | 32132003248880 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... West Newbury - G.A.R. Memorial Library | F SAT | 32135001518568 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Westford - J.V. Fletcher Library | F SATHIAN | 31990005042184 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Wilmington Memorial Library | FICTION SATHIAN, SANJENA | 32136003473109 | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
One of The Washington Post 's 10 Best Books of 2021 * One of NPR's Best Books of 2021 * New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice * Long-listed for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize
"Dizzyingly original, fiercely funny, deeply wise." --Celeste Ng, #1 bestselling author of Little Fires Everywhere
"Sanjena Sathian's Gold Diggers is a work of 24-karat genius." --Ron Charles, The Washington Post
How far would you go for a piece of the American dream?
A magical realist coming-of-age story, Gold Diggers skewers the model minority myth to tell a hilarious and moving story about immigrant identity, community, and the underside of ambition.
A floundering second-generation teenager growing up in the Bush-era Atlanta suburbs, Neil Narayan is funny and smart but struggles to bear the weight of expectations of his family and their Asian American enclave. He tries to want their version of success, but mostly, Neil just wants his neighbor across the cul-de-sac, Anita Dayal.
When he discovers that Anita is the beneficiary of an ancient, alchemical potion made from stolen gold--a "lemonade" that harnesses the ambition of the gold's original owner--Neil sees his chance to get ahead. But events spiral into a tragedy that rips their community apart. Years later in the Bay Area, Neil still bristles against his community's expectations--and finds he might need one more hit of that lemonade, no matter the cost.
Sanjena Sathian's astonishing debut offers a fine-grained, profoundly intelligent, and bitingly funny investigation into what's required to make it in America.
Soon to be a series produced by Mindy Kaling!
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Sathian's dazzling debut centers on the Indian American community of Hammond Creek, Ga., where the high-achieving children of immigrants compete for top grades and pageant titles. In 2006, 15-year-old Neil Narayan is part of the debate team at school, though he has always been unremarkable compared to his Duke-bound older sister and his best friend, Anita Dayal. But things change when Neil discovers the secret behind Anita's triumphs: a spellbinding concoction made from gold, which Anita's mother, Anjali, brews using jewelry swiped from their more successful neighbors' homes. After Neil drinks the potion, he becomes smarter and sharper, but his newfound ambition soon leads to a tragic event that forever changes the lives of Hammond Creek's residents. A decade later, an aimless Neil--now a struggling history PhD candidate at Berkeley--is shocked when Anita reappears with a plan that will once again test just how far he is willing to go to create the life he desires. While the stakes feel a bit lower as the final ploy plays out, the sharp characterizations bring humor and contemplation in equal measure, touching on the pressures Neil and Anita face to produce a legacy that honors their parents' sacrifices. Sathian's bildungsroman isn't one to miss. Agent: Susan Golomb, Writers House. (Apr.)
Booklist Review
High-school student Neeraj "Neil" Narayan has a problem: Among a sea of high-achieving Indian American kids in Hammond Creek, Georgia, including his sister, who may be headed to Duke, he is average at best. As Neeraj flails under the pressure of his family's ambitions, he chances upon a way out. Neeraj's neighbor, Anjali Dayal, and her daughter, Anita, are into alchemy. The premise: You can steal gifted Indian Americans' potential by consuming their gold jewelry, quite literally. Out of this nugget of magical realism, Sathian spins pure magic. As Neeraj juices up on gold, his life careens out of control until a stunning tragedy forces him to pick up the pieces and move on. Filled with pathos, humor, slices of American history, and an adrenaline-pumping heist, Sathian's spectacular debut also highlights the steep costs of the all-American dream. Neeraj reflects, "We had not grown up imbibing stories that implicitly conveyed answers to the basic questions of being: What did it feel like to fall in love in America, to take oneself for granted, in America? Starved as we were for clues about how to live, we would grip like mad on to anything that lent a possible way of being." Pure gold.
School Library Journal Review
Gr 9 Up--Neil is first-generation Indian American: His father emigrated from India to attend university, and his mother left India to marry his father. His parents settled in suburban Atlanta in a small community of Indian immigrants all striving to ensure that their kids become successful. The pressure to meet expectations is relentless and by high school, Neil is overwhelmed and underperforming. But his best friend and next-door neighbor Anita seems to have switched up gears dramatically. Neil discovers that Anita and her mother are making an alchemical drink derived from ancient Indian lore about the power of gold, which infuses Anita with extra drive and purpose. Neil wants in. But to make this elixir, they have to steal, and perhaps not just gold. It's not long before something dreadful happens and Neil and Anita must come to grips with their part in the tragedy, take responsibility, and make amends. This is an intense and riveting immigrant coming-of-age story, alternately funny and serious, mashed up with magical realism that makes a moving, heartfelt statement of how to become you, no matter who you are, where you are from, or where you are now. VERDICT Perfect for teens who enjoy deep reads like Adib Khorram's Darius the Great Is Not Okay and Samira Ahmed's Love, Hate & Other Filters.--Gretchen Crowley, formerly at Alexandria City P.L., VA
Guardian Review
In a fictional Atlanta suburb that's a "bubble of brownness", young Neil Narayan wonders if, in post-9/11 Bush-era America, "there were other ways of being brown on offer". He is not sure there are, not unless he can "write himself" into American history. "There was no room to imagine multiple sorts of futures", either. Sanjena Sathian's satirical and magical debut, Gold Diggers, is full of such searches for answers: for alternative histories and futures. Pressured by Indian immigrant parents, Neil, like his peers, is desperate to excel. In his world, excellence means top grades, teen pageants and Ivy League universities. He is even more desperate, however, for the attention of his high school crush Anita Dayal. And then he discovers that she and her mother are gold thieves; they have been stealing jewellery, and by extension "ambition", from folk within their community and melting it into an ancient alchemical potion in their basement. This "lemonade" is a shortcut to success, transferring the ambition of the owner of the gold to the drinker. Overachievers both, Neil and Anita can't get enough of the drink and ride high on their own friends' ambitions. But there are consequences to stealing a part of someone, and the lemonade soon begins to leave a bitter aftertaste. Fast forward a decade and, in the second half of the novel, there's a shift from adolescent Bildungsroman to adult shenanigans in Silicon Valley and a Bollywood-esque jewellery heist. Neil, now a PhD candidate in history at Berkeley, and Anita, a Stanford drop-out, are surreptitiously reunited. Together, they turn nostalgic, remembering the misadventures and tragedies of their teenage years. They could still use a dose of the good old lemonade, but Anita's mother - the original creator of the drink - needs it more. Will they steal to secure her future, as she once did for them? With a pacy plot and a protagonist you feel for, Gold Diggers blends magic, mythology, alchemy and melodrama into a story about anxiety, assimilation and ambition ("the substance to settle the nerves of immigrant parents"). Indian immigrants, we're told, were "duty bound to live out" the American dream. But "what does it mean to be both Indian and American?" The question troubles Neil and Anita, who identify as "conceptual orphans". The pair are always thirsty for answers - as they once were for the gold potion that boosted their desire to succeed and therefore truly belong, and as their ancestors were before them, for America itself: "the metonymy for more". In some ways, Gold Diggers is a delightful concoction of the best of South Asia's literary offerings, reminiscent of Hanif Kureishi's irreverent humour in The Buddha of Suburbia and, more recently, the magic realism of Mohsin Hamid's Exit West and Salman Rushdie's work. Despite these locatable lineages, Sathian has forged a narrative path entirely her own. She is not interested in social realism or satire for satire's sake. Instead, she tackles familiar issues of mental health, the "model minority" trap and the generation gap with a fresh literary toolkit and voice. There's also a foray into historical fiction through the insertion of "The Tale of the Bombayan Gold Digger", a nugget of history that Neil discovers in the library in an attempt to locate Indian roots on American soil during the California gold rush. Gold is among the rarest, most precious and malleable of metals. Sathian brings a golden touch to the 21st-century Indian American novel - stretching it through a reimagining of history and mythology, yet holding it close to her chest.
Kirkus Review
Young strivers in an Indian American enclave are both boosted and undone by a gold-infused elixir. Sathian's debut, a refreshing tweak of the assimilation novel, is narrated by Neil, aka Neeraj, who's surrounded by high-achieving desis while growing up outside Atlanta. In high school, Neil is talented at debate, if only half interested in it; his sister, Prachi, is fixated on winning the local Miss Teen India pageant. His neighbor and friend, Anita, seems the perfect mix of beauty and brains, but her parents are separated, subjecting them to the whispered judgments of the community. The family might be outcasts, except that Anita's mother, Anjali, has mastered the art of brewing a gold-spiked drink that supposedly helps those who consume it attain their ambitions. Anjali's sideline is a whispered secret, and because the gold must possess something of the personality of more successful people to work, much pilfering of jewelry boxes is afoot. Just as Sathian artfully and convincingly conjures a world in which such a drink exists, she sensitively exposes how its powers backfire. A tragedy that ensues from the pursuit of the "lemonade" slingshots the novel into its second half, as both Neil and Anita are in their 20s, living in the Bay Area, and struggling with disappointments: Anita is fresh off a breakup and has just left her job at a venture capital firm, and Neil can't make headway on his history dissertation on the Gilded Age, sidetracked by a story about an Indian man during the gold rush. Sathian's shifts into romance- and heist-novel tropes in the late going aren't always graceful, but she does a fine job of showing how the ladder-climbing, Ivy League--or-bust fixations of Neil and Anita's community lead to hollow grown-up behavior. (Especially when blended with all-American go-getter--ism; Neil acquires robust Adderall and coke habits.) Sathian has a knack for page-turner prose, but the story has plenty of heft. A winningly revamped King Midas tale. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
DEBUT Opening in the early 2000s, Sathian's debut novel takes readers on a journey through the lives of the Dayal and Narayan families in Hammond Creek, GA. Typical angst-ridden teen Neil Narayan pines for Anita Dayal, who is vying for the title of Miss India Teen America, GA, and wants to go to Harvard, and feels pressure like his Asian friends to strive to meet the stereotypically high expectations of their families to succeed academically. Still, all's well until revelations regarding the curious properties of a gold-infused elixir disrupt their lives. Moving forward to 2016, Neil and Anita unexpectedly reunite in northern California, and Anita presents Neil with a dangerous proposition to procure gold and re-create the gold-infused elixir for her ailing mother. Exploring the many meanings of the clever title, this multilayered work looks at the history of Indians in America since the gold rush, the matrimonial prospects of gold diggers, and the ethical ramifications of stealing gold for use in alchemy, even to help a loved one. VERDICT A fast-paced, well-crafted story about what it means to be both Indian and American that will likely be appreciated by readers who enjoyed the dark and mysterious elements of Jean Kwok's Searching for Sylvie Lee, Celeste Ng's Everything I Never Told You, and Susie Yang's White Ivy.--Shirley Quan, Orange Cty. P.L., Santa Ana, CA