Shine, Coconut Moon

This novel brought up a lot of issues for me, most of which I grappled with in my teen years but never really resolved until quite recently.  Shine, Coconut Moon is written by Neesha Meminger who was born in India but grew up (as I did) in Toronto.  As Neesha explained in her Writers Against Racism post, life in Canada wasn’t easy for her family; despite the endless rhetoric about multiculturalism, there is still a lot of intolerance and instances of bigotry to be found in “the Great White North.”  With her YA novel, Meminger recreates the months immediately following 9/11 here in the US, when violence against anyone who “seemed” like a terrorist (brown-skinned, and/or turbaned, and/or possibly or actually Muslim) was viewed by many as patriotic payback.  The novel is set in a suburb of New Jersey, and despite the relative diversity at her high school, Samar (or Sammy) has no South Asian friends.  When her estranged uncle, Sandeep, arrives on her front door hoping for reconciliation, Samar embarks on a journey of self-discovery, slowly realizing how ignorance of her Sikh heritage has left a hole inside of her.  It has also led to intense anger, which Samar directs primarily at her mother; though the two are extremely close, and Sharan is a progressive, feminist social worker, Samar grows to resent her mother’s endless efforts to keep her safe.  The world has turned upside down, Samar and her uncle are being targeted by violent white “patriots,” and the only anchor Samar can find is in her family origins.  Sharan cut herself off from her family after enduring years of intense criticism around her life choices, her gender identity, and even her skin color; yet Samar becomes desperate to meet her grandparents (who live 90 minutes away), and part of the novel revolves around Samar’s efforts to reconnect with the two people who hurt her mother most.  Interestingly, Samar doesn’t seem to have much interest in finding her father (her parents divorced when she was two), but through another Sikh girl at school Samar discovers an online world full of debate and valuable information about her culture.  She visits a gurdwara (Sikh temple) with her uncle, and struggles to articulate her feelings of being both more and less American since the terrorist attacks.

There were several points in the novel when I had to blink back tears.  Initially, Samar adores and envies her white friend, Molly, who has a large, welcoming Irish family.  But when Molly’s family treats Uncle Sandeep with distrust, Samar begins to question her life-long friend; old wounds inflicted by schoolmates in previous years are opened once more, and even Samar’s white boyfriend, Mike, shows a lack of sensitivity (to him, she could easily be “Mexican”).  This novel reminded me of the many times I erased myself as a teen in order to make my white friends feel more at ease; my own discomfort around issues of race or class I simply swept under the rug, in part b/c I feared they would find my “difference” impossible to understand or even tolerate.  For Samar, being silent and invisible is no longer an option; she breaks up with her boyfriend (though he continues to stalk her) and makes an effort to get closer to the Indian girls at her school.  But it is Molly who rises to the occasion and shows her true colors, time after time.  I really liked the way Meminger subtly incorporated instances of teenage girls standing up for one another–even the mean girls have some depth in this novel.  Rather than try to reform all my relationships, I left Toronto and embarked on my own journey of self-discovery here in the US; having a novel like this when I was a teen would have been a priceless gift indeed.  GO GET THIS BOOK!  And if you know a teen struggling to discover and/or define herself, pass it on…

You can find Miss Attitude’s review here.