One Amazing Thing (Divakaruni)

Book Reviews 
The appeal of these life stories, like that of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, is that they throw the spotlight onto varied lives, each with its own joys and miseries. Together, the stories show how easy it is to divert young lives into unforeseen and restrictive channels, and how hard it is for people to realize their early dreams. Their shared experiences and fears form the frame that holds together this compendium of short stories into an absorbing novel....At the end of her novel, her readers are fully engaged in what will happen to those nine people.
Washington Post

The plot of Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni's new novel could be ripped from the horrifying headlines about Haiti in a strange case of art imitating life.... One Amazing Thing, which was written well before the Haiti earthquake, is receiving high praise.
USA Today

Masterful storyteller Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni examines such stories in an apropos novel for our times. Her suspenseful tale of nine souls who suddenly don't know if they will live or die is a tribute—on many levels—to hope and survival. But it is also, most successfully, a ringing rebuke to rushes to judgment. It's an adult, literary version of The Breakfast Club, with dire circumstances. 'Hell is other people,' Uma thinks as she looks at one of her fellow distraught victims. But redemption can be other people, too, Uma and the others soon understand.One more amazing thing we've learned from Divakaruni.
Miami Herald

In a soggy treatment of catastrophe and enlightenment, Divakaruni (The Mistress of Spices) traps a group of nine diverse people in the basement of an Indian consulate in an unidentified American city after an earthquake. Two are émigrés who work for the consulate; the others are in the building to apply for visas. With very little food, rising flood water, dwindling oxygen, and no electricity or phone service, the victims fend off panic by taking turns at sharing the central stories of their lives. Oddly, the group spends little time brainstorming ways to escape, even when they run out of food and water, and sections of ceiling collapse around them. They wait in fatalistic resignation and tell their tales. Some are fable-like, with captivating scene-setting and rush-to-moral conclusions, but the most powerful are intimate, such as the revelations an accountant shares about his impoverished childhood with an exhausted mother, her boyfriend, and a beloved kitten. Despite moments of brilliance, this uneven novel, while vigorously plumbing themes of class struggle, disillusionment, and guilt, disappoints with careless and unearned epiphanies.
Publishers Weekly

Nine people of diverse backgrounds trapped by an earthquake in the basement of the Indian consulate in an unidentified American city—that's the situation Divakaruni (The Palace of Illusions) sets for herself here. The thoroughly American Uma immigrated with her parents as an infant and is now a graduate student. She tries to concentrate on reading Chaucer while waiting to apply for a visa to visit her parents, who have moved back to India, but spends more time speculating about the people around her. When the earthquake hits, African American army veteran Cameron takes charge, while Uma encourages each of these modern-day pilgrims to share a story of "one amazing thing." The pilgrims range from a young Muslim man hoping that he can visit his parents' ancestral home to an upper-class Caucasian couple planning a trip to the Taj Mahal. As the stories unfold, they tell as much about the diversity of Indian culture as they do about the American "melting pot," which lets some groups Americanize more successfully than others. Verdict: Writing with great sensitivity, Divarkaruni presents snapshots that speak volumes about the characters, so unexpectedly drawn together. Highly recommended. —Debbie Bogenschutz, Cincinnati State Technical & Community Coll.
Library Journal

After the glorious complexity of The Palace of Illusions (2008), Divakaruni...presents a wise and beautifully refined drama.... A storyteller of exquisite lyricism and compassion, Divakaruni weaves a suspenseful, astute, and unforgettable survivors’ tale. —Donna Seaman
Booklist

A diverse group trapped in the aftermath of a disaster shares tales of love, loss and desire. Divakaruni's latest (The Palace of Illusions, 2008, etc.) harkens back to her earlier collections of short stories more than it coalesces as a convincing novel. Seven visa applicants wait for the services of two bureaucrats in the basement-level visa office of an Indian consulate somewhere in America. "It was not uncommon, in this city, to find persons of different races thrown together," Divakaruni writes. "Still, Uma thought, it was like a mini UN summit in here. Whatever were all these people planning to do in India?" Suddenly, a massive earthquake strikes, trapping them in the dark and forcing them to confront each other. An angry young man named Tariq Husein seethes as Cameron Grant, an African-American veteran, assumes leadership of the trapped group. Mr. Pritchett, who had hoped a trip to India would lift his wife's depression, endangers them all by trying to light a cigarette despite a gas leak. Malathi, a clerk at the consulate, stands up to him when he takes away Mrs. Pritchett's medication. Jiang, an elderly Chinese woman injured in the quake, tries to protect her granddaughter Lily. In the midst of their ordeal, Uma, a grad student first glimpsed reading "The Wife of Bath's Tale," comes up with the idea of having each person relate an incident from his or her life. "Everyone has a story," she says. "I don't believe anyone can go through life without encountering at least one amazing thing." The individual tales are engaging, but the mechanical setup and the lack of resolution in the primary narrative make it difficult to fully embrace all that follows. Compassionate stories, many of them inspired, suspended in half of a novel.
Kirkus Reviews