Reviews
Reddi’s understated prose and her choice of detail give her revelations a quiet power… Reddi’s nuanced handling of her characters’ anxieties shows the delicate paradoxes that the children of immigrants face.
The New Yorker
Reddi’s stories, even when about the price of immigration, are never bleak, suffused instead with gentle humor. She has a wicked eye for detail… she is always good at getting under the skin of her characters.
San Francisco Chronicle
Reddi writes softly but carries the proverbial big stick….. characters and plots linger long after you turn the page.
The Washington Post
Reminiscent of Jhumpa Lahiri’s award-winning collection, Interpreter of Maladies… [A collection] with substance and depth. In their struggle to fit in, Reddi’s characters may be flawed, heartbroken and lost, but also, to the reader’s great satisfaction, capable of glorious redemption.
The Philadelphia Inquirer
Through close observation of human behavior, the author presents characters grappling with the immigration experience in America…
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Rishi Reddi, whose brilliant, elegiac story ustice Shiva Ram Murthy appeared in The Best American Short Stories 2005, proves that a strong voice will always be heard.... Set in the Boston area, her book’s interlinked stories vividly dissect and celebrate the region’s Indian immigrant community. [Her] lines combine subtlety and power…
Boston Magazine
What Reddi gives us is the visitor’s Boston, the Boston of the Freedom Trail and the State House. And yet...it becomes something more, something different: a metaphor for the divisions between... all of us.
Los Angeles Times
This excellent debut collection is deceptively easy to read. . . A great recommendation not only for fans of Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake but also for fans of F. Scott Fitzgerald's elegant studies of a culture that is both familiar and foreign.
Booklist
Reddi’s voice is gentle and her eye watchful, and the dilemmas of her often-isolated characters are by no means solely those of the immigrant community. A soft-spoken, sympathetic collection.
Kirkus Reviews
Only the finest writers can craft short stories with the richness of a novel, and that is precisely what Reddi has done in this exceptional debut collection. She has burrowed so deeply into the lives of her characters as to make them not only real individuals, but very memorable and sympathetic ones. It is a most impressive achievement.
Arthur Golden, author of Memoirs of a Geisha
These stories have a stillness and clarity of language that allow immediate closeness to the emotional lives of the characters. . . . Sad, sweet, tender – truly a lovely book.
Kiran Desai, author of The Inheritance of Loss and winner of The Man Booker Prize
Reddi has written a unique and beautiful book with the power to both entertain and educate. The reader is left to ponder whether making up one’s own mind – and heart – to be free is a decision that can transcend both custom and country.
Judith Guest, Bestselling author of Ordinary People
Rishi Reddi’s characters are complicated people: lonely, prideful, loving, lost and, as are the stories they inhabit, memorable and very worthy of our attention. Exquisite.
Binnie Kirshenbaum, author of Rabbits for Food
There is a real feel here for the interplay between people – the intense moment of anger that comes with a person’s realisation that a close friend doesn’t share exactly the same values and attitudes; the quiet reconciliation that follows shortly on the heels of an argument.
Jabberwock
In each of the seven expertly crafted tales, Rishi keeps us balanced on the fence, where we can clearly see both sides, and feel the push and pull from the green grass of both. She provides us with gentle truths and emotional debates that open our awareness, empathy and understanding of the fear that change can bring, along with its exciting possibilities.
Mostly Fiction