Trail of Broken Wings

There is something achingly powerful about this profoundly moving story of domestic abuse and its deep-seated, long-lasting impact on the psyche and dynamics of an immigrant Indian/American family. With its exquisitely crafted characters, rich emotional texture and compelling prose, the narrative consumes from start to finish.When photographer Sonya reluctantly returns to the family home in California after an absence of many years, it’s at the behest of her mother Ranee. Sonya’s father, Brent, is in a coma, and Ranee wants her youngest daughter home to say goodbye alongside her sisters. As the four women gather in anticipation of Brent’s demise, long-buried secrets and memories crash into the present, forcing Ranee and her daughters to confront their shared, painful and, until now unspoken history.Badani tackles the difficult subject of abuse with sensitivity and aplomb. Through alternating voices, we hear the women’s stories from their own and each other’s perspectives, a technique that skillfully exposes the conflict between the people they are and the images they portray. All four have been moulded by brutal patriarch Brent, who is bitter at having sacrificed his own life in India to secure a better one for his family.Badani delves deeply into the hearts and souls of her characters, creating people you sympathise with and care about. She somehow even makes you feel compassion for Brent, the creator of this broken family. The narrative is at times poignant and absorbing, at others explosive and shocking, carrying the reader on a wave of emotion as you accompany the women on their journey from guilt, blame and retribution to truth, self-acceptance, forgiveness and healing. The final twist is cleverly concealed and a perfect ending to the book.Just a small point of criticism. I have to knock off a star for Badani’s irritating habit of having her characters indulge in lengthy introspection in the middle of a conversation. By the time the dialogue picks up again, you’ve forgotten who last said what to whom. This happened too often and spoilt my enjoyment of an otherwise great book.Thanks for reading my review. I hope you found it helpful. You can find more candid book reviews on my Amazon profile page.

The book is the story of three sisters and their mother, each victims of the same violent man. It offers us four perspectives on the aftermath of such abuse but the risk whenever a book offers four points of view is that it almost inevitably becomes longer than necessary and often rather repetitive. Two of the women get to deliver their tales in the first person, and the other two in the third. Whilst this makes the ‘whoswho’ slightly easier to follow, I didn’t find enough difference between the four to really justify the four viewpoints. I also found it hard to believe that any woman who’d been beaten black and blue by her father and told she should have been aborted by her mother would turn up to his deathbed to sit beside him in his coma. Sure, come back to switch the nasty bastard’s life support off, but this whole appearance of playing happy families just didn’t work for me.Sonya’s the youngest, the professional photographer whose own mother told her she should have been aborted. That’s quite a cross to carry though it does get resolved near the end when we realise her mother’s motivation. Sonya has become obsessed by unpleasant violent sexual pornography – but the author seems to have just chucked that in as an aside and completely fails to explain or to solve it. The middle daughter is Tricia, her father’s favourite, who has magically wiped an absolutely life-changing memory from her mind in a way that’s hard to believe. We’ve just been watching the woman who accused a potential Supreme Court judge telling the world about what happened 30+ years ago. She might not remember all the details but she certainly hadn’t forgotten the attack that was seared into her mind. But somehow Tricia has blocked out something that has made her terrified to have children of her own. And finally we have Marin, the eldest, who has to confront her own abuse in order to help deal with the abuse of her daughter – but still slaps the poor girl to get her to reveal her bruises. Their mother Ranee is the longest suffering but has managed to look away from having all three of her daughters badly damaged by her husband.I didn’t find any of the characters very believable or feel any significant sympathy for them. Too much was hinted at but not delivered. The author attempts to justify the father’s violence as the consequence of his disappointment with America and the racism he found there after moving from India but that’s a bit of a ‘blink and you’ll miss it’ part of the book. Are we supposed to try to understand him or sympathise with him? I don’t think so. Others have commented how ludicrous it was to call the father ‘Brent’. Surely any Indian parent wanting to give their son a more international sounding name wouldn’t have picked Brent. The three girls also have non-Indian names despite two of them being born in India before the family relocated and the family being Hindus. I know that’s not important but it jarred and disturbed me.I read a lot of books about immigrant experience but felt this one could as easily have completely ignored where the family came from and their immigrant experience and made the whole family natives of just about anywhere. Their Indian origins added almost nothing to the story other than giving a perfect opportunity for a bunch of clichés about wanting your children to over-achieve.If you want an outstanding book about an abusive family that will stay with you long after you've finished reading, I'd like to recommend 'An Obedient Father' by Akhil Sharma.

During the first chapter I was not sure if I would enjoy this book. There was no back story but then it became obvious that the whole story was coming out as each sister told their story both from the past and in the present. It shows that everyone has differing memories of the same situation and that the way you see thing can be a way of protecting yourself from complete breakdown. I did not warm to Marin at first but as the story progressed you see how each daughters life has become the way they deal with the past, all in completely different ways although their childhood had the same horrors or ones that they had shut out completely. The mothers story too slowly came out and you see how the constraints of the culture they had been born into and strived to keep as they moved to the USA shaped how she dealt with things. This seemed to divide them, because you felt that as they got older if they had stood together against the father they would have been stronger and may have been able to move away and perhaps have had happier lives.

This book is clearly written from both the heart, and experience by the looks of it. The author relates a very true to life family situation, expressed superbly, and you can feel the emotion from each family member. It succinctly describes how our early years and childhood and family situation can define us and shape how we grow and what we grow into and how we then develop into adults and then how we interact with others and our behaviour. A book that is very worth reading, Im sure nearly all of us have had some major event in our childhood, and this book will make you think. Excellent!