Sugar, smoke, song A novel

The nine linked stories in Rajbanshi's sterling debut collection blend snapshots of immigrants from Africa, Asia, and South America in New York and California, as well as flashing back to experiences in their home countries. The layered "The Stars of Bollywood House" is studded with Indian recipes that break up the story's puzzle pieces, which include a grief-stricken daughter, a desperate father, and the characters' periodic escape from life's anguish in the U.S. and India via the romance of Bollywood. In "Mufaro's Beautiful Daughter," a storytelling contest makes a little girl aware of subtle racial tensions among the various immigrants who live around her. The ending is both violent and emotional. "Blues: A Dance Manual for Heartache" weaves mythological snippets, descriptions of dances, and stops on a New York City subway ride into a tapestry of memory, discovery, hope, and sadness. The title story is told in fragments headed in turn by the three words, mixing an unstable romantic relationship against a backdrop of family turmoil. The book's title hints at the elegiac nature of Rajbanshi's prose, but she also brings polish and precision. Her sentences are crisp and economical but also poetic and full of imagery. Each story contains a fully realized world, often revealed in elliptical pieces, and the collection coheres beautifully. This is a stunner. (June)

A debut collection of linked stories about women trying to escape tricky family relationships only to re-create them in the world. In Bollywood movies, melodrama can be delicious and fun, but in fiction it's tricky to keep it from sliding into histrionics. That's what happens in many of these stories, in which sisters betray each other, families draw blood, and men behave rakishly. In "The Stars of the Bollywood House," for example, we see Jumi, a Harvard grad, wasting away from a broken heart. This is the third story about her. In the first ("Ode on an Asian Dog"), Jumi dumps Walt, her cloddish college boyfriend, 30 times. In the second ("Swan Lake Tango"), she's graduated and dating Sammy, her tango partner, and talking nonstop about Walt. She cries in front of displays of wedding necklaces, recalls all the terrible things Walt said ("How he's moved on, how he prefers white girls to her, how everyone said he was too good for trash like her"), and refuses her father's love. This goes on for more than 30 pages, and though Jumi's father, who narrates most of the sections, has an endearing voice and his own emotional scars, it's hard not to catch yourself thinking, "Pull yourself together, Jumi!" The star of the book is the Bronx, which Rajbanshi captures in all its rich complexity: its "buoyant crayon streets" with "Pakistani women in salwars pushing strollers...baby-faced Puerto Rican girls laughing in tight jeans and swinging hoop rings...." Rajbanshi writes some beautiful, arresting sentences. "The precious thing about the old," one character observes, "is that their skin feels the way butterflies look." But because of the overly dramatic plots and underdeveloped characters, it's hard for her poetic sensibility to shine. Style alone cannot carry these stories. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.