READ Valenzuela: Mistress of Spices  

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Photo Credit:  sleepyneko (2008)

Divakaruni's first novel, The Mistress of Spices, revolves around Tilo, an Indian girl with magical powers. After Tilo survives a shipwreck and is trained by a mysterious figure, she is sent through transmigration to act as the Mistress of Spices in an Indian store in Oakland, California. There she serves the overt and hidden needs of her Indian immigrant clientele. When Tilo falls in love with an Indian American, she must choose between her magic and a more mundane life. The novel garnered glowing reviews for the author's lyrical style, its combination of fantasy and realism, and its portrayal of the immigrant experience that goes beyond the stereotypical. "Divakaruni has written an unusual, clever and often exquisite first novel that stirs magical realism into the new conventions of culinary fiction and the still-simmering caldron of Indian immigrant life in America," praised Shashi Tharoor in a contribution to the Los Angeles Times Book Review. In a review for Tribune Books, Tammie Bob noted Divakaruni's "distinct storytelling, setting, and subject," as well as the novel's "opulence of language, graceful narratives that weave intense, poetic images" and "fascinating characters." "If Tilo's choice is rather predictable, the way ... Divakaruni gets us there is anything but," declared New York Times Book Review contributor David Guy. According to Tharoor, Divakaruni's style is "distinctive. Her penchant for sentence fragments, once [the reader gets] used to her cadences, often works to good effect. ... She has an allergy to question marks that sometimes leads her interrogatories to fall flat. But her narrative is infused with poetry." Likewise, Bob maintained that "due to Divakaruni's lovely prose, the magic seems reliable and credible." On the topic of magic, however, Tharoor remarked otherwise. "Although Divakaruni does the magic rather well, writing about the mystical spices in prose that raises light off the page like so many wisps of incense, she is best at the realism. She has a keen feel for immigrant life."

Contemporary Authors Online, Gale, 2009. Reproduced in Biography Resource Center. Farmington Hills, Mich.: Gale, 2009. http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/BioRC

Other books by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni include Sister of my Heart (2000), Arranged Marriage (1996), and The Palace of Illusions (2009).