The story opens in 1995 with the suicide of a woman named Nilima, which sends her husband, Ripon, spiraling into grief. The couple ran a poultry farm and sold eggs in Bangladesh, but after inclement weather and the disease Ranikhet ravaged their brood, it appeared they would not be able to pay off their loan. The woman’s death also leaves behind an infant daughter; the husband is unable to take care of her by himself. The narrative cuts to the present, when a young woman named Irene Sebastian travels to Bangladesh on a work trip. While there, she contacts an NGO to investigate the adoption of a little girl brought to the United States. It becomes clear that the crying baby left behind by the grieving widower and his dead wife is now the adult Irene, and Mohit uses the rest of the novel to fill in her life story after her arrival in America, including a traumatic car crash and an adoption by a white American couple. This is a novel about self-discovery and family with an affecting opening vignette; the husband’s all-consuming grief remains the story’s most memorable element, and Irene’s adoptive mother’s leukemia diagnosis adds an additional moving emotional layer to the latter half of the novel. Unfortunately, Irene isn’t very well drawn. She is an overachiever, idealistic about her globalist satellite company, Starlink (and her boss, Elon Musk), but Mohit characterizes her as overly deferential and vacuous. (What does she find so meaningful about this company and her work? It’s unclear.) The reader learns very little about her inner life, and the prose often reads as flat and cliché (a character “absorbed [information] like a sponge”; another experiences a “storm swirling in her mind”). With an outcome that feels inevitable, there’s little here to encourage the reader to keep going.
