Wonderful and powerful book. Even if you had never been to Darjeeling, or to India, for that matter, it gives you an unexplained sensation of melancholy, as if the place belonged to your ancestry. It even made me run for the Internet to know more about Darjeeling and the tea business. A real lesson in geography and tea-tasting!

Apart from the obvious mastery of the language in descriptions, the story is an ode to self-growth and sufficiency, both for men and women. As in reality, love is not a bed of roses. Instead, real love is the ability to love oneself first, then the other. This can be seen when Aloka simulates being Parveen; she fell in love with her first, then discovered that she loved Jahar just as well.

It is a book I greatly recommend for all those who enjoy an intricate story without the classical happy ending.

This is a thoroughly captivating and insightful book that takes the reader to the beautiful mountain town of Darjeeling and to an intriguing family that owns a tea plantation. There are issues of love, displacement,and self-renewal all told through a lyrical voice. The story and the characters stay with you. This is Kirchner's best work by far.

The Healthy Cuisine of India is a GREAT cookbook. I LOVE the recipes in this book. This is my first and only Indian cookbook so I can't really compare it to other Indian cookbooks. But I do know that I enjoy the food from these recipes even more than eating out at Indian restaurants. The author gives lots of details explaining the different types of spices and how to prepare them. There is also some discussion of the lore associated with the various recipes. And the food tastes GREAT. Highly recommended.

I'm not sure why I chose to read "Sharmila's Book." It's not my usual fare. (I tend to read thrillers, courtroom dramas and ethnic or political nonfiction.) Still, I found myself drawn into Sharmila's fascinating dilemma as she struggled with her Indian and American heritage. Ms. Kirchner is a very talented writer. She keeps the reader interested and describes her scenes thoroughly, writing for the Indian and non-Indian alike. I read the entire book in less than a week, sometimes staying up late at night because I wanted to follow Sharmila on her journey. And what a tantalizing journey it was!

This book introduced me to the complexity and depth of Indian culture both in India and America. The author did a good job, I think, of describing Indian foods, values, clothing, and social challenges. However, the book contained some plot gaps that made me wonder how the protagonists got "from here to there" which ruined the sense of disbelief needed while reading fiction. Still, I lost alot of sleep as I read and read to reach the end of Sharmila's tale.

Sharmila's story cast a magic spell on me.Like being back in India.I have been to New Delhi and I could identify the many locales suggested in the book. The writing is clear and precise. Unlike many pompous Indian novels, this one is approachable.

This book started out beautifully- a wedding ceremony in desert India amongst 7-year olds. The bride- kidnapped and taken away by bad guys to the big city never to see her child/husband/friend again. And then- bam! We're in San Francisco with a very American main character named Meena who we're supposed to relate to as the child bride. But of course by now, she's educated, wears jeans and jogs, and has a great job in computer software. A Quantum leap into the future. Ms. Kirshner had the right beginning but took the story in the wrong direction. I kept reading the book, mainly because I was very interested in the Indian/Bengali cultural aspects of the story. Also. the "caught between two cultures" idea seemed realistic. The rest of the story ended up being a schmaltzy love story with a predictable ending. Everyone "adjusted" way too easily to the conclusion. Disappointing at best.

To her credit,Kirchner is able to keep a comfortable level of suspense throughout the book, so that you do keep reading. She writes prose and dialog very well, but she constructs immaturely. She falls into the traps that await first authors (and that her editor should have helped her overcome): shallow and awkward characterizations, too much time spent on situations or conversations that do not advance the real story, way too much detail (you know what everyone is wearing and what they are eating and how the color yellow makes their eyes a deeper blue, and gobs of advice on marathon running, etc., etc.) and telling us a fact/feeling rather than showing us through plot or character.

Shiva Dancing starts off dramatically, with an intimate picture of the village Indian culture, during which Meena is kidnapped from her wedding at seven years of age and ends up with adoptive parents in San Francisco. Exciting, but downhill from there. Rather than beginning by returning Meena to India when she is an adult, to search for her past and her future among her people, family, and child-groom, Meena and the author do their best to avoid that storyline (it would have been a good one) and get bogged down in unimportant details and relationships in the US. Meena is a woman focused on her job, finding a man, distance running, finding a man, patio gardening, and finding a man. She has only a mild background interest in India, her past, and her child-groom Vishnu. She is not a haunted, lonely, longing woman lost between the two cultures that join within her spirit (which would have been a good character). The major portion of the book is filled with Meena's friendships; her flirtation with Carlos, a charming, manipulative commitment-phobe; and her love affair with Antoine, a less charming, more manipulative commitment-phobe. Antoine is about to get engaged to his long-time girlfriend but now he wants a fling with Meena to avoid the commitment. Meena, who the author keeps reminding us is 35 and very intelligent, should know better. An opportunist is easy to spot. But Meena falls for it because Antoine has such sadness and suffering in his eyes. What's he got to suffer about? Well, nothing. He's wealthy, famous, acutely handsome, engaged to be married and playing around with Meena. No, there's no trauma or torment in his life -- just that he's a louse. Meena falls for it, though she should be focused on her own pain, confusion, and needs, but she is too shallow to let her own life truly affect her. The romance advances as, about halfway through the book, Kirchner suddenly shifts into Antoine's head, showing him to be a tender, teary-eyed, aging man who is soooo confused about his life. Oh, please.

The plot is also bogged down by Meena's work place and career, which is in peril. Here again the characters are shallow and awkward, drawn to suit the situation rather than made real and driving the situation. However, there are just too many characters and too many subplots throughout, so when the real story gets going in India, finally, after nearly 300 pages, it is told sketchily, with no real significance except that Meena flatly states she finds she is American, not Indian. Meena's story is intercut occasionally with Vishnu's, her long-lost child-groom. He too is awkwardly characterized, and his situation is supposed to lend mystery to the book. It doesn't -- his passages are uninteresting and tell little about life in India, so it becomes a pleasure to return to Meena's and Antoine's silly romance.

Shiva Dancing is not a bad book -- it was entertaining, though overwritten with detail and more about San Francisco culture or computer programming than Indian culture. It is no follow- up to M.M. Kaye's The Far Pavilions or Shadow of the Moon, which were so rich with Indian culture that it was awesome, or Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's novels and short stories (double-awesome!). I have hope for Kirchner. Her writing style is good and readable, but the substance needs a lot of revision. Despite having too many characters in Shiva Dancing, she is still in control of her story. This shows real promise. It is not easy to write a novel, a first novel or a subsequent one, but Kirchner has the talent. She is capable of writing intelligent and memorable novels if she will make the effort and discard this sort of silly, shallow fluff.

Yes, Kirchner falls into some first-time author traps, but it was still an excellent read. I have read a lot of Indian fiction, and compared to the book I had just finished (The Blue Bedspread), Shiva Dancing was a page-turner. It does seem to start out better than it ends, and she does pack quite a lot of characters into the story. The software industry storyline was dissatisfying...we don't really get a good end to that whole plot.

Some of the characters were pretty one-dimensional, especially the Gossetts. What were they doing in India at all if they were so anti-India? What was the deal about their son getting killed there?

When Meena leaves Karamgar, she doesn't seem to want to return there...yet then at the end she wants to go back and do computer training.

The love story might have been a bit contrived, but I'm a romantic at heart I guess.

Even in spite of all these critiques, I really enjoyed this book. I liked reading about modern India, the perspective of a village child transplanted in cosmopolitan India and the U.S., and the life of a single woman with a dog-eat-dog career in San Francisco. I think this was great as a first novel. I have confidence that Kirchner will continue to refine her novel-writing skills. I look forward to reading her other work.