Leave It to Me (Ballantine Reader's Circle) [Paperback]

Bharati Mukherjee (Author)

Book Description

Series: Ballantine Reader's Circle | Publication Date: September 14, 1998

"A very fine writer, funny, intelligent, versatile and, on occasion, unexpectedly profound."
--The Washington Post Book World

"MUKHERJEE IS FEARLESS . . . DARING AND WITTY . . . Take the wild ride with Debby DiMartino from Albany to San Francisco, from lost child to masked avenger."
--The Boston Globe

"POWERFULLY WRITTEN . . . Debby has no memory of her birth parents. All she knows is that she was born in a remote Indian village, the daughter of a hippie back-packing mother and a mysterious Eurasian father, both of whom have disappeared almost without a trace. . . . Her quest for her biological parents turns into an obsession. . . . Leave It to Me . . . shows Mukherjee at the peak of her craft. . . . Mixing the Greek myth of Electra with the Indian myth of Devi, she sends Devi/Debby careening down on the Bay Area like an elemental force of vengeance."
--San Francisco Chronicle

"DEVI IS A BRILLIANT CREATION--hilarious, horribly knowing and even more horribly oblivious--through whom Bharati Mukherjee, with characteristic and shameless ingenuity, is laying claim to speak for an America that isn't 'other' at all."
--The New York Times Book Review

"STUNNING . . . An astute, ironic, and merciless insight into an aberrant version of the American dream."
--Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

India-born author Bharati Mukherjee has long used fiction to explore issues of identity and culture, often through displaced characters--Indians coming to the West (Jasmine) or Westerners heading to Asia (The Holder of the World). In Leave It to Me Mukherjee approaches the same issues from a fresh angle; protagonist Debby DiMartino grows up in a middle-class, Italian-American family in Schenectady, NY, yet she is "a tall girl in a small school, a beautiful girl in a plain family, an exotic girl in a very American town." Debby is adopted, abandoned as a baby by her American hippie mother and Eurasian father in India, where she was placed in a Catholic orphanage until the DiMartinos took her in. Growing up, Debby identifies herself by what she is not; at age 23, after a brief, disastrous love affair with a Hong Kong ex-movie star, she decides to find out what she is.

Debby's search for her birth parents takes her to San Francisco, where she lifts a new name off a vanity license plate and begins a new life as Devi Dee. Along with her old identity, Debby/Devi sheds her old conventions, becoming a "Tenderloin prowler, all allure and strength and zero innocence" as she lives out of her car in Haight Ashbury, befriends the crazy, the strung-out, and the paranoid who populate its streets, and begins her hunt for the woman who gave her life--a search that will lead Devi into an apocalyptic confrontation with a most unexpected demon. In Leave It to Me Bharati Mukherjee has created a hip, violent, and darkly funny look at what it means to be an American at the end of the 20th century. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

Uncontrolled violence has a disturbingly prominent place in Mukherjee's new novel, as it does in much of her writing (e.g., The Holder of the World, LJ 10/1/93). The main character and narrator, Debby DiMartino, was born in India to a California flower child and a Eurasian serial killer. Having been adopted by an Italian American family in New Jersey, Debby, now in her twenties, begins to investigate her origins. She changes her name to Devi after seeing it on a vanity license plate but never learns that she has taken the name of a Hindu deity. Devi, who manifests her ancient namesake's fierce and destructive nature, also ironically exemplifies the morally shallow, me-centered prototype of the present day. She alone survives the devastation she causes by trying to identify her "bio-parents." A disturbing book; recommended for all libraries.?Rebecca A. Stuhr, Grinnell Coll. Libs., Ia.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 239 pages
• Publisher: Ballantine Books (September 14, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0449003965
• ISBN-13: 978-0449003961
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.1 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (20 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,390,219 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Insufferable, November 29, 2001

By 

Manola Sommerfeld (California) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Leave It to Me (Ballantine Reader's Circle) (Paperback)

How this book got published is a mystery to me. This has got to be without a doubt the worst novel I have ever read. There are no redeeming qualities here. The story line is ridiculous. The coincidences are too much to bear. Debby, who is adopted by an Italian couple as a toddler, never develops much love for them, even though they are decent, loving people. She saves her love and sick fascination for her birth parents, a Fresno woman who went to India in the 60's looking for a guru, and the guru himself, a serial killer currently in prison. She wants to meet them and then do some sort of damage to them, as payback (for what? She was better off growing up in Schenedctady). Debby graduates from college and manages to become the lover of a filthy rich ex-Jackie Chan of sorts. He doesn't give her the respect she "deserves" so she torches his apartment. Then she escapes to California, in search for bio-parents. While in the Haight-Ashbury, she manages to charm a film producer who happens to know her bio-mom. Debby is the luckiest person on earth!!! There are 30 million souls in CA and she happens to bang the guy who is banging her mom. Debby (now named Devi) will not know this until later in the story, when the private eye she has hired reveals the whole mystery, and soon disappears, and at this point I had had enough of this poor excuse for a novel and threw it across the room. The only thing that really piqued my interest is the reference to Ashrams in blue collar Napa. Wow. Other than that, this was a waste of pulp.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Waste of Time, February 27, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: Leave It to Me (Paperback)

Bought it cheap from a bargain book table, read it fast and regretted almost every minute. If you like language for its own sake, you might like this novel because there are some awfully pretty and interesting turns of phrase. But if you actually read because you like reading an interesting, well-told story about characters that at some level seem human, skip this book. It's worse than a violent pulp novel, because at least those types of books make you work to reach the end of your bad story. Reading this felt like hard labor, and I'm not even sure how it ended after reading the ending twice.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars possibly the worst book i have ever read, August 18, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: Leave It to Me (Ballantine Reader's Circle) (Paperback)

I would give this a big old zero, if I could.
The writing is not even up to the level of supermarket pulp novels. The main character is an utterly unsympathetic self-described "waif" who isn't even particularly interesting. I can't make myself care how many men she slept with, much less why her tastes run from movie producers to shell-shocked Vietnam vets. No motivation is ever given for Devi's tendencies toward shoplifting, promiscuity, or murderousness (which in itself is apparently intended as pop-psychology shorthand for self-destructiveness) except that she is the abandoned daughter of an American hippie and an Asian pseudo-cult leader, and at one point she states that she believes in nature over nurture. Maybe she's just a horrifyingly immature brat. In chorus with Mukherjee, Devi drags us on her bad trip that promised an intriguing premise, but quickly turned into an exercise in unintelligent absurdity. If this book really was a work of pulp rather than a novel with pretensions to mythological allegory, it would probably be a lot more fun.
I didn't pay a dime for this book, just pulled it out of a box of throwaways from a friend who was moving, and I can see why it was destined for the garbage pile.