*Starred Review* Who better to capture the seismic shifts under way in India as the digital revolution takes hold than laser-precise and sharply witty Mukherjee? In each of her dramatic, slyly satirical novels, she dissects the legacy of colonialism, the paradoxes of technology, and the traditions that shackle Indian women. Mukherjee subtly continues the stories of the sisters from Desirable Daughters (2002) and The Tree Bride (2004) as she introduces Anjali Bose, a smart, rebellious 19-year-old who flees her provincial town after her father's attempt to arrange her marriage goes catastrophically wrong. With the help of her scholarly, covertly gay, expat American teacher, Anjali finds refuge in a decaying mansion, a remnant of the Raj, in Bangalore, the booming capital of call centers and electronic start-ups. There the brave country girl undergoes a crash course in urban life and the fizzing world of outsourcing, avatars, and social networks. Each character fascinates, and every detail glints with irony and intent, as Mukherjee brilliantly choreographs her compelling protagonist's struggles against betrayal, violence, and corruption in a dazzling plot that cunningly considers forms of tyranny blatant and insidious in a metamorphosing society. Mukherjee's resilient Miss New India takes as her mantra a line from her photographer friend: Nothing in the world is as it seems it's all a matter of light and angles. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Acclaimed Mukherjee's take on outsourcing and India's rise will provoke lively discussion.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist

A tightly woven narrative about navete and personal growth in contemporary India.The title refers to Anjali Bose, who's trying to delicately balance her identity between the "old" India of her parents and the "new" (and more Westernized) India of her peers. Nineteen-year-old Anjali is from Gauripur, in Bihar province, a not-very-happening place. Her dissatisfaction and boredom are compounded by her lackluster lower-middle-class household, for her father wants to arrange a marriage for his daughter, and Anjali has little patience for this hoary convention. Moreover, her father's track record is unprepossessing, for Anjali's only slightly older sister has been through the process and is already divorced. Despite her father's trotting out more than 75 possible candidates, Anjali has found no one she likes or respects. It's conceivable that Anjali herself is part of the problem, for she wants far more than either her family or her environment can give her. And when one seemingly ideal candidate for the position of husband rapes her, Anjali is out of there. After a brief stop at the apartment of her unsympathetic sister, and with the urging of ex-pat English teacher Peter Champion, she heads off to Bangalore to test her English-speaking skills in the burgeoning service industry being outsourced to that teeming city. Within 24 hours of her arrival, she has come in contact with a more diverse group of people than she had met in her entire life. Armed with an introduction (from Peter) to Minnie Bagehot's boarding house, she meets the seductive Husseina, the Christian Tookie from Goa, and the eccentric "Mad Minnie" herself. Despite a two-week cram course in colloquial English, Anjali fails (in a hilarious way from the reader's perspective) to land a job. And she faces other reality checks as well, including being dragged into the local police station and being completely duped by Husseina.Mukherjee explores Anjali's issues with understanding and sympathy.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Twenty-first-century India is a strange juxtaposition of the old and the new, the east and the west, as shown in this draggy novel from National Book Critics Circle Award-winner Mukherjee (The Tree Bride). While most young women still wind up married before they reach their 20s, "hobbled by saris, carrying infants," Anjali Bose, a 19-year-old college student who prefers to be called Angela ("or better yet, Angie"), is lucky to have a patron in her former high school teacher, American Peter Champion, who encourages and enables her to leave smalltown Gauripur for Bangalore, the dot-com and call-center capital of India. Angie's departure, however, is delayed so that she can go through the full extent of the horrors of old-fashioned Indian matchmaking and worse when one of the prospective grooms forces himself on her. In Bangalore, Angie can change herself, but darker events lurk on the horizon. This is a curiously unfulfilling book, as Angie drifts into events and out of them, never quite taking charge of her destiny. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

The acclaimed author of The Tree Bride explores the clash between traditional and contemporary India in this story of a young woman from the provinces trying to make her way in the booming city of Bangalore. Anjali Bose, the daughter of a railway clerk, is facing a disastrous arranged marriage. In a long and harrowing bus journey south, she flees her provincial town in northern India, hoping to find work in a call center in Bangalore. Here, Anjali's story takes as many surprising twists and turns as a Dickens novel; she even finds lodging in a decaying old mansion owned by Bangalore's version of Miss Havisham. VERDICT With its fast-paced story and sympathetic portrayal of a young woman trying to make it on her own against all odds, this novel is essential reading for anyone interested in contemporary Indian and Indian American fiction. For those new to the genre, Anjali's story is a good place to start. Highly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 11/15/10.]-Leslie Patterson, Rehoboth, MA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

NATIONS are narratives. Every country is shaped by its particular set of ideas and myths. Inevitably these are simplifications, often clichés, but they hold a country together, imposing a certain coherence on diverse populations. The narrative of modern India has changed over the last few decades. For much of its post-independence history, India epitomized the concept of the Third World. It was a land of desolate poverty and immutable hierarchy - "an area of darkness," in the memorable title of V.S. Naipaul's first book about the country; a place of "heat and dust," in the only slightly less dismal title of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's 1975 novel. But now India is moving on, and so is the Indian narrative. The country has grown rapidly since the early 1990s, when its stultified socialist economy began to be reformed. Today, as India has become an increasingly confident world power, the old stories are being replaced by new ones - many equally clichéd - about boundless opportunity, tremendous wealth, social mobility and technological prowess. Bharati Mukherjee's eighth novel indulges in many of these new clichés. The heroine of "Miss New India" is a young woman, Anjali Bose, who escapes the constrictions of small-town Bihar, one of India's most backward states, for the promise of Bangalore, one of the country's (and the world's) fastest growing cities. There she works at a call center, falls in love, meets dynamic young entrepreneurs and marvels at the fortunes being made all around her. She encounters her share of hardships - police brutality, real-estate sharks - but ultimately succeeds in reinventing herself. As its title suggests, then, "Miss New India" is a kind of parable for the new nation. This parable is not without its pleasures: Mukherjee's writing can be evocative, even poetic. Her descriptions of Anjali's cultural dislocation are often marked by a keen psychological acuity. The problem is that the novel's plot unfolds in an almost wholly predictable manner. Mukherjee's often fine prose style is ill-served by a certain thematic and narrative conservatism, an apparent inability to look beyond the received and by now broadly disseminated platitudes that have come to define the "New India" (itself something of a platitude, since the nation remains a churning and often bewildering mix of the old and the new, the archaic and the modern). Mukherjee's tendency to rehash conventional wisdom is most evident in her descriptions of Bangalore, a city that in the popular imagination, both domestic and foreign, has come to represent something of an ur-metaphor for 21st-century India. Mukherjee's Bangalore (or "Bang-a-Buck," as one character insists on calling it) is an all-too-familiar caricature. It is "roaringly capitalistic," "the new center of the universe," a "go-for-broke, rule-bending, forget-about-yesterday, and let's-blow-it-all" place populated by tech-savvy, "hyperconfident" young Indians who speak in exaggerated American accents and have replaced the abstemiousness of art earlier generation with the titillations of casual sex, alcohol and nightclubs. THESE portrayals aren't wholly inaccurate. (Although the book does contain the occasional error: Starbucks, a company whose "wondrous" logo excites visions of sophistication in Anjali, has not yet set up shop in India.) Bangalore is indeed an impressive place, but Mukherjee's shining, prosperous version of the city is a gross simplification, a tiny slice of the modern Indian experience. It is also a little facile in a country where millions remain hungry and in poverty, and where a majority is still shut out from the tremendous wealth and opportunity being seized by a tiny elite. (Consider, for example, that in a country of almost 1.2 billion people, only around two million are employed by the technology and outsourcing sectors, industries whose success has recently shaped public perceptions of the society at large.) Fortunately, the novel improves as Mukherjee shifts her attention from social commentary to the particulars of Anjali's experiences in Bangalore. In earlier novels like "Jasmine" and "Desirable Daughters," Mukherjee has written movingly about the migrant experience, and she is clearly on familiar (and firmer) ground when charting Anjali's struggle to orient herself in a world unlike the one she has known before. Anjali's complexity, gradually revealed as the novel progresses, belies the predictability and superficiality of the fictional landscape she inhabits. "She'd seen this movie a hundred times," Mukherjee writes early on, soon after Anjali arrives in Bangalore. It's an apt - if curious - summary of the novel as a whole, which often feels a little rehearsed, a recitation of the middle-class fantasies and myths that have increasingly defined India. That kind of mythmaking is well suited to the project of nation building. The tremendous optimism and energy of modern India are to a significant extent strengthened by the country's self-regarding illusions. But literature should go deeper - below the surface of conventional wisdom, beyond the simple (and simplistic) stories that nations like to tell themselves. Akash Kapur's nonfiction book about India, "India Becoming," will be published next March.