SUMMARY
Jasmine by Bharati Mukherjee tells the journey of a young girl from India who as a grown woman finds herself in a small farming town in Iowa living with a man with a disability having fled New York City. As the story unpeels like an onion, the reader learns of Jyoti's village girlhood, the dreams of her married life as Jasmine, the violence of her widowhood, her reinvention as Jaz, a nanny in New York City, and her role as mother to an adopted teenage son from Vietnam. Filled with adventure, romance, and global turmoil, Jasmine is a story about creating oneself.
WHY I ENJOYED READING
I loved this book, because I personally related to the character in that I have lived multiple lives in multiple places, each time a different person to those around me. I found the relationships between the characters of particular interest and how different characters saw Jasmine for her whole being and others loved the idea of her and feared the parts of her they didn't know and didn't want to know.
In particular, I like the way the story unfolds, so that rather than going in chronological order, we meet a midwestern woman and then like one might in real life, we dig deeper and deeper into her life story to discover who she really is and all of the layers that brought her to where she was for better or worse.
WHY STUDENTS MIGHT ENJOY READING
As I reread passages of the book I'd forgotten about, let me refer you to the Sensitive Subjects below. This book definitely contains adult content.
That said, I think that students will relate to the yearning that Jyoti has as a young girl for a life that is bigger than the one she has been put in. The story also unveils a great deal of adventure and intrigue and surprises that teach us how little we know about the people around us. Many students will relate to being in a new place and learning a new culture, while others may find this opportunity to learn about a non-American culture and another point of view of American culture interesting.
WHY TEACH & TEACHING TIPS
The writing itself is fascinating. Mukherjee's sentence structure - with sentences that are often so short and simple, they build intrigue like a set of crumbs for the reader to follow, often leading to more questions than answers. "Taylor didn't want me to run away to Ohio," starts chapter two, but the reader doesn't find out who Taylor is until many chapters later. Or, "In Baden, I am Jane. Almost," and the reader becomes hungry to know why, "Almost."
In places, paragraphs become like poems through the use of repetition, "A dog, but not a dog....A dog that dragged its hind legs. A dog that danced, jerkily, as it walked. The dog headed back for us. Its eyes glowed red, its slack jaws foamed."
One major point I would focus on in this story is dynamic character and the search for identity, "There are no harmless, compassionate ways to remake oneself. We murder who we were so we can rebirth ourselves in the images of dreams." One question worth exploring is how much impact the male relationships had on the character. Her "name" in each instance changes with what the men call her. How much agency does she have in her own reinvention? Is she actually a new, different person on the inside or is each name she embodies a mask she wears? For example, "Later, I thought, We had created life. Prakash had taken Jyoti and created Jasmine, and Jasmine would complete the mission of Prakash. Vijh & Wife."
Subject themes include immigration, identity, education, and motherhood.
SENSITIVE SUBJECTS & WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW
This book includes descriptions of sexual activity, incidences of sexual and political violence.
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