Why a Booktrail?
1930s – 40s: Leaving home is one thing. Surviving is another. Study, honour and obey – but what do young children of the Punjab do once they leave home?
The Good Children
What you need to know before your trail
1930s – 40s Lahore, the Punjab.
Two brothers and their two younger sisters are brought up to be ‘good children’, who do what they’re told. Beaten and browbeaten by their manipulative mother, to study, honour and obey.
Sons Sully, and Jackie escape to study medicine in the USA and England getting into unsuitable relationships. Meanwhile back at home, sisters Mae and Lana, try to study and behave well but neither of them want to be trophy wives so they decide to strike out on their own.
The Good Children grow up and leave home but as each one returns they have to face the consequences for ever and the saying ‘ you can take a child out of its home life but you can’t take the home life completely out of the child’
Travel Guide
The story beings and ends in a place that no longer exists and was even then disappearing. In Lahore, the Punjab, India.In the late thirties, the events were already in motion that would slice the Muslims off the west an east sides of India like dangling limbs, and rename our divided territory Pakistan.
The settings represent the various cultures and lifestyles that the children find themselves in as the move to different countries and have to immerse them selves in more social mores and cultural differences. Such a strict upbringing has left them with some difficulties in adapting and all these are explored to full affect
What use are your ninety five percent in mathematics if you cannot make samosas or French pastry?
The novel develops from 1938 to 2009 and so the book is a true journey through the lives and various countries of the good children. The expectations and desires of a traditional family from Lahore may seem distant and even shocking to a Western reader, but why the mother and family act the way they do is succinctly examined and explained so that by the time the children are ready to leave home, we understand them more and can see things through their eyes. The difference in treatment between the girls and boys for example is where the main differences lie – how the sons try to fit in with their colleagues and friends and indeed lovers in England and America respectively.
Even the clothes in this novel are important for even as the fashions of the daughters change from the traditional outfits of Pakistan revealed as gaudy and flamboyant in the west, reveal different expectations and the need for them to take more notice of their new surroundings.
If you want to understand and experience different cultures and experience life in 1930s Lahore then this is the book to do it with.
Booktrailer Review
Clare:
A story of discipline and disobedience, punishment and the pursuit of passion. ‘Tea and sweets, crime and punishment’
Taking in turns to tell their story, everyone of the Good Children try and manage to escape their old lives and their very overbearing home environment only to find that invisible strings that bind them are a lot stronger than they first thought.
The delight and unique storytelling ability of Roopa, not an author we had come across before shamefully, is what makes this novel so enjoyable. Her characters are flawed and sensitive yet the reader can relate to each of them in different ways. How the four children develop into adults has to be one of the main joys of this novel – set against a culturally diverse background.
Children and their parents seem to act the same the world over to various degrees. Maybe we are not that different from each other after all.
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