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Title: The Toss of a Lemon

Author: Padma Viswanathan

Narrator: Farah Bala

Format: Unabridged

Length: 26 hrs and 21 mins

Language: English

Release date: 10-17-17

Publisher: Audible Studios

Genres: Fiction, Historical

Publisher's Summary:

Sivakami was married at 10, widowed at 18, and left with two children. According to the dictates of her caste, her head is shaved and she puts on widow's whites. From dawn to dusk, she is not allowed to contaminate herself with human touch, not even to comfort her small children.

Sivakami dutifully follows custom, except for one defiant act: She moves back to her dead husband's house to raise her children. There, her servant Muchami, a closeted gay man who is bound by a different caste's rules, becomes her public face. Their singular relationship holds three generations of the family together through the turbulent first half of the 20th century, as India endures great social and political change. But as time passes, the family changes, too; Sivakami's son will question the strictures of the very beliefs that his mother has scrupulously upheld.

The Toss of a Lemon is heartbreaking and exhilarating, profoundly exotic yet utterly recognizable in evoking the tensions that change brings to every family.

Members Reviews:

Fictionalized Biography of Early 20th Century Brahmin Family

A toss, that's all it took. The mid-wife's tossing a lemon to the expectant father waiting outside the birthing room's window, allowed him to calculate and chart his newborn's life. Just a toss. Lives were foreshadowed, marriages arranged, and destinies set.

Have you ever wondered what it must have been like to live in your own great-grandparents' era? What customs were they bound by? And how differently they viewed their time, what we see as `history'.

Reminiscent of great epochs such as War and Remembrance (Wouk) and The Manor (Singer), The Toss of a Lemon (Viswanathan) brings us into her family's late 19th century home in southern India. We become the fly-on-the-wall. From her great-grandmother Souvakami's marriage as a child bride, to her demise decades into the 20th century, we see life through her eyes.

Viswanathan's plot isn't exceptional. It's that of every family; living, rejoicing, and grieving. And as mundane as that may be, she breathes life into each character--and there are many--letting each one speak with his own point of view and voice. Her objectivity as narrator is a remarkable quality. It allows us to watch with an unbiased eye.

She empowers the reader to vividly sense locale, food, and customs. The author transports us to the hot, dusty paths of the fields and the exclusive quarter of Brahmin homes. One can almost taste the curries and vegetables with Viswanathan's descriptions of food preparation, cooking, and spices. Rather than explaining Brahmin ritual, she portrays it. Whether incorporating them in the food's placement on banana leaf plates, the proper behavior of a widow and her inability to touch anyone before sundown, or divining a suitable marriage partner with a horoscope, we learn the Brahmin way of life.

Swept up in the changing political tide, we see old values discarded, much like shells left on the shore as the sea foam ebbs. British imperialism, the caste system, and its values are questioned. The price for a modern India is embodied in the losses Souvakami endures.

As sophisticated as we like to think we are, nothing surpasses entertainment as that of the ancient storyteller. With The Toss of a Lemon, Padma Viswanathan holds the primitive `speaking stick'. Sit. Allow yourself to be spellbound.