Customer Reviews

Two Virgins: A Novel

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This coming of age story of two sisters in India is one of Kamala Markandaya's finest works, and my favorite of hers. It is a story of awakening, exploring a time when a child, through events beyond her control, loses her childhood naivete, descriptively termed as her "bubble". An adult book with a timeless story that explores childhood, womanhood, poverty, abortion, prostitution and humanity in a chaotic world.

In this book "Two Virgins" Kamala Markandaya takes us into the lives of two sisters who gradually bloom and are on the threshhold of physical maturity set in the background of post Independence India. Kamala navigates very deftly into the lives of Saroja and Lalitha and makes her characters breathe so realistically that we will not forget them once we read the book.
All readers of feminist novels will enjoy this book and it is one of her finest works.

I grew up reading "Nectar in a Sieve" and was very excited to find "Two Virgins." I found the depiction of life in an Indian village- and a young girl's "seduction" by the city- very interesting. However, I found the older sister quite unbelievable and not at all sympathetic, so it was hard to be involved in her story. (Sometimes she seemed so oversexed it was ridiculous.) The novel also moves very slowly at times. I wasn't quite sure whether the very ending was supposed to be fatalistic, comical... or what.