Secretly in love with her best friend and business partner Steve, fifteen-year-old Jazz must spend the summer away from him when her family goes to India during that country’s rainy season to help set up a clinic.
- ISBN: 9780440238409
- Author: Perkins, Mitali
- Published: 2006 , Laurel Leaf
- Themes: Coming of age, Friendship, Love
- Descriptors: India, Realistic Fiction, Young Adult (ages 14-18)
- No. of pages: 272
“Monsoon brings new gifts and blessings every year” (p. 256) said Sister Das the director of the orphange in India where Jazz Gardner’s family is volunteering one summer. “Monsoon Summmer” chronicles the adventures of Jazz Gardner as her parents take her and her brother to India to help the orphange from which Jazz’s mother was adopted years ago by an American couple. Jazz, a bi-racial teen, has been raised in Berkeley Ca, and has no interest in her mother’s “do-gooding.” She does have an interest in her own business, “Berkeley Memories” a booth where she and her friend (or is he more than a friend?) Steve take pictures of people reliving their college days at UC Berkeley and making postcards from the pictures. Jazz has her money saved for that car she will get when she turns 16 next year.
However, her mother’s do-gooding, does take her away from Berkeley to Pune, IN, where Jazz begins a transformation that will change not only her life, but the lifes of several orphans at the orphanage.
The author of Monsoon Summer, Mitali Perkins, does a skillful job of documenting a coming of age story with a microfinace twist. She takes on the issue of subtle and not so subtle racism within cultures as well.
The book moves smoothly through Jazz’s inital unhappiness with her parent’s decision to go to India and take the children with them to her final realization of who she can potentially be within her family and within society.
One teacher, whose family roots are Indian, said upon reading the book “I have finally found a book which mirrors MY culture and MY experiences. I am going to buy it for the young girls at our temple.”