If you want a glimpse of how cults/sects work yet still want to laugh, read this book. Gritty, unapologetic yet funny, this one is a page turner! ( )

I really wanted to give it 3.5 stars. This book hit home for me in many ways. I don't want to make this review about me, but let me say that I have spent time in India, in an Ashram (a different one) and then 5 years simply living there (nothing to do with the mentioned Ashram). So I could easily identify with Rachel and the people she lived with. And yes India is really that insane. All of it.Bizarre things happen on a daily basis. (I KNOW) This book for me was like looking in a mirror in some ways...like looking into a shared past,like visiting home. It made me miss aspects of the life I had there. Well...it brought those feelings to the forefront (I think about India frequently, my experience was more positive) If you are curious about India...life in India..the people...etc, take a leap..read this book. Keep in mind the author is dealing with her issues; so we are sharing her "crap". But we all have "crap". And its funny. I had several laugh out loud moments. And I can say that I have been inspired....maybe one day I will write my own memoir...I can only hope that I can write it with the humour this book has. ( )

I like reading the occasional memoir, depending on the person's life, but I don't usually read them for their writing style. But Brown's memoir was wonderful to read, because it was super-interesting, AND the writing was great. She managed to be funny, despite obviously working through her trauma and bitterness -- I suppose because she wasn't just making fun of the sources of her trauma, but also at herself. Highly recommended. ( )

(also posted on LJ--content is the same)

I’ve been wanting to read this book, the author’s memoir of years spent as the lone child in an ashram in hot and dusty central India, for quite some time. I’m interested in the emotional costs of alternative lifestyles, in how children cope with the untenable situations they sometimes find themselves in, and what sense they make of their caregivers’ decisions.

I was wary as I approached the book because I knew, from Rachel’s blogging, some of the things she’d suffered as a kid, and I thought the book had the potential to be harrowing. She could have written it that way, but instead she wrote it with humor. What a difference that made! Without in any way trivializing the horrors she witnessed and experienced, her humor makes the book not only bearable, but a real pleasure. It’s a good book. It’s a really good book. It’s so good that I was reading it out loud to my family and recommending it to people at random.

The pleasure comes not only from her humor, but also from her insight, as when she thinks about the lessons she, her mother, and her driver Khan have taken from their dangerous childhoods:

Mom and Khan and I had all grown up knowing that no one would protect us, but we had taken different messages from the same lesson. Khan learned that the hard survive and the empathetic are crushed. Mom learned that all suffering is for a reason, and the greater the pain, the greater the purpose. I learned to see every injured stranger as a fallen comrade.

This got me wondering about how we choose the the message we take from life. Is it possible to? Is it down to chance? Luck? Personality?

Rachel is clearly a fighter from the beginning, and throughout. Bullied at school, she manages to persuade a number of fellow victims into jumping the bully and giving him quite a trouncing. Others step up to fill his shoes, but that particular boy never picks on her again.

Later, she adopts the historical warrior hero Shivaji as a role model. She describes him as “a guerilla fighter, a trickster, an Indian Robin Hood,” a leader of the Marathas, a people who “rarely sacrificed their lives to a losing cause, and often enough … died successful, contented, and in bed.” She notes that “if Maratha warriors committed suicide, it was for personal reasons or to escape torture”—an observation that’s especially significant when you get to the chapter in which Rachel herself is driven to attempt suicide by what she’s experiencing. On the verge of stabbing herself, she asks herself if any of the Marathas she admires committed suicide. She picks up her history book to check … and decides that it would be

a shame to waste the time I had now, that I could spend reading a book or otherwise doing something fun, being dead … How could I sacrifice the rest of this day? I was safe at home, and nothing terrible was likely to happen until tomorrow.

I got up, replaced the knife and the chair, and picked up History of the Marathas.

I could always kill myself later.

People do come along who encourage her. There’s Nancy, who compliments her on her writing talent (“the first time that … an adult had praised me in a way that I could believe,” she recalls), and Carla, who introduces her to Anne McCaffrey’s dragon books and the concept of genre fiction, and Walter, a boy who becomes her friend in escapist adventure games and whose own family life leads her to realize that “I wasn’t the only one of our duo who had trouble with real life.”

And that’s another thing I enjoyed about the book: Rachel’s personality. She doesn’t suffer fools gladly, but she’s also extremely generous, empathetic, honest, and fair-minded. I was very touched that she included, at the end of the book, a letter that her mother had written describing a dream that her mother claimed Rachel had had as a child. It’s nothing like anything the Rachel we know from the book would be likely to dream and very much the sort of thing that Rachel’s mother would like to have Rachel dream, but Rachel includes it anyway, a kindness to the mother who was, to be blunt, largely responsible for Rachel’s childhood unhappiness. Why does she include it? Because “it seems only fair to give her this small chance to misrepresent me,” Rachel says.

Well. What more can I say. I highly recommend this book.
( )

(also posted on LJ--content is the same)

I’ve been wanting to read this book, the author’s memoir of years spent as the lone child in an ashram in hot and dusty central India, for quite some time. I’m interested in the emotional costs of alternative lifestyles, in how children cope with the untenable situations they sometimes find themselves in, and what sense they make of their caregivers’ decisions.

I was wary as I approached the book because I knew, from Rachel’s blogging, some of the things she’d suffered as a kid, and I thought the book had the potential to be harrowing. She could have written it that way, but instead she wrote it with humor. What a difference that made! Without in any way trivializing the horrors she witnessed and experienced, her humor makes the book not only bearable, but a real pleasure. It’s a good book. It’s a really good book. It’s so good that I was reading it out loud to my family and recommending it to people at random.

The pleasure comes not only from her humor, but also from her insight, as when she thinks about the lessons she, her mother, and her driver Khan have taken from their dangerous childhoods:

Mom and Khan and I had all grown up knowing that no one would protect us, but we had taken different messages from the same lesson. Khan learned that the hard survive and the empathetic are crushed. Mom learned that all suffering is for a reason, and the greater the pain, the greater the purpose. I learned to see every injured stranger as a fallen comrade.

This got me wondering about how we choose the the message we take from life. Is it possible to? Is it down to chance? Luck? Personality?

Rachel is clearly a fighter from the beginning, and throughout. Bullied at school, she manages to persuade a number of fellow victims into jumping the bully and giving him quite a trouncing. Others step up to fill his shoes, but that particular boy never picks on her again.

Later, she adopts the historical warrior hero Shivaji as a role model. She describes him as “a guerilla fighter, a trickster, an Indian Robin Hood,” a leader of the Marathas, a people who “rarely sacrificed their lives to a losing cause, and often enough … died successful, contented, and in bed.” She notes that “if Maratha warriors committed suicide, it was for personal reasons or to escape torture”—an observation that’s especially significant when you get to the chapter in which Rachel herself is driven to attempt suicide by what she’s experiencing. On the verge of stabbing herself, she asks herself if any of the Marathas she admires committed suicide. She picks up her history book to check … and decides that it would be

a shame to waste the time I had now, that I could spend reading a book or otherwise doing something fun, being dead … How could I sacrifice the rest of this day? I was safe at home, and nothing terrible was likely to happen until tomorrow.

I got up, replaced the knife and the chair, and picked up History of the Marathas.

I could always kill myself later.

People do come along who encourage her. There’s Nancy, who compliments her on her writing talent (“the first time that … an adult had praised me in a way that I could believe,” she recalls), and Carla, who introduces her to Anne McCaffrey’s dragon books and the concept of genre fiction, and Walter, a boy who becomes her friend in escapist adventure games and whose own family life leads her to realize that “I wasn’t the only one of our duo who had trouble with real life.”

And that’s another thing I enjoyed about the book: Rachel’s personality. She doesn’t suffer fools gladly, but she’s also extremely generous, empathetic, honest, and fair-minded. I was very touched that she included, at the end of the book, a letter that her mother had written describing a dream that her mother claimed Rachel had had as a child. It’s nothing like anything the Rachel we know from the book would be likely to dream and very much the sort of thing that Rachel’s mother would like to have Rachel dream, but Rachel includes it anyway, a kindness to the mother who was, to be blunt, largely responsible for Rachel’s childhood unhappiness. Why does she include it? Because “it seems only fair to give her this small chance to misrepresent me,” Rachel says.

Well. What more can I say. I highly recommend this book.
( )