Franciska Soares

A tale across multiple generations, that paves way for the reader to discover a beautiful history with facets such as love, lust, rape, murder, honor, abuse, experimentation etc., but ultimately entwine into a colorful drama. Mining through ancestral history can certainly uncover wonderful yet distrubing truths. 'Pippa', the present day protagonist, not only unravels carefully buried pieces of the past but also develops a new found certainity to seek her own destiny.

This novel is so well written! The twists, the turns! The author has captured the emotions of the characters so beautifully, that they tend to linger with you even as you set the book aside. Every chapter of the book has a slice that ultimately builds into this heart-wrenching yet uplifting story. I really enjoyed this novel and would recommend it!… (mehr)

I received an ARC of this book via Library Thing.

A multi-generational family saga is always a good read if done right. The Portuguese-Indian community is one of whom very little literature can be found so this was definitely of interest to me.

On the whole, the book works. It keeps the reader engaged and interested. This is not the kind of book you read for major plot twists but rather for the treatment of it's main and supporting characters.

My only gripe, if it can be called that, is the use of over-the-top "flowery" language. This is a fairly common thing with most writers with ties to the Indian subcontinent. It is almost as if the author finds it hard to describe simple things without showing off their poetic flair. Sometime simple is enough.… (mehr)

Disclaimer: An electronic copy of this book was provided in exchange for review by the author, via Library Thing.

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Franciska Soares’ They Whisper in My Blood sets out to be a multi-generational saga dealing with topics as weighty as racial prejudice, colonialism, forbidden love, and family secrets. That it succeeds even partially is due more to the power of the subject matter than to the wordsmithing of the author.

Soares is moving from nonfiction to fiction for the first time, and she has brought along a portmanteau stuffed with the vocabulary of a scholar, emptying its contents into the narrative in a landslide that will send most readers scrambling for a probably-nonexistent dictionary to deal with arcane and obscure words, specialized terms from multiple mythologies, sprinklings of Portuguese, Hindi, French, and Latin, late-nineteenth-century slang, and several occasions in which she attempts to disguise a currently-popular obscenity by simply dropping the letters F A into the text. They riot across the page, disrupting the flow and distracting the reader. Just when one thinks one has nailed down “argute”, “Caerus”, “gnomai”, and “mafficking”, along come “podsnapper”, “bafflegab”, and (this reviewer’s favorite) “ripsniptious” -- which will certainly be dropped into conversation the very moment a suitable definition can be obtained.

Once the reader has come to terms with the style, there is a compelling storyline that jumps back and forth between the late 1800s and contemporary times. Unwound from the time-shifting, it centers on Pippa Cabral, an Indo-European woman in her 50s, reared in India by parents of Portuguese extraction, who has emigrated to New Zealand and built a life there. Bored and frustrated by the imposed solitude of that country’s mandatory lockdown in response to the Covid epidemic, Pippa decides to explore her family’s history. Aided by computerized genealogical programs and abetted by conveniently-left diaries from several generations, Pippa uncovers a rich and vibrant (if not always particularly honorable) history of unconventional characters, sexual peccadilloes, colonialism, miscegenation, and considerable flouting of the societal norms of the time. Ultimately, she decides that if her forebears could follow their hearts, she, too, can attempt to make contact with her first love – a man who was unacceptable to her family.

There is a lot here about her great-grandmother and her two siblings, all of whom followed outwardly acceptable life paths but whose deepest desires led them, each in their own way, to rather royally screw up their own or other peoples’ lives. Pippa’s grandparents’ generation was then left to try to straighten things out, at which point this reviewer had to fall back on a quick and messy genealogical chart to clarify just what it was that so horrified Pippa about her own parents and provided the ultimate spur for her to reach out to her lost love. It’s unfortunate that Soares gave short shrift to that generation, as their own internal conflicts and the choices they made were at least as interesting (if not moreso) than Pippa’s path, which led to an abusive marriage that is dismissed almost as quickly as it is introduced and which seems to have little to do with the overall plot.

There are some magnificent scenes in this book, as Soares describes Bombay (she uses the terminology of the era) and its people. The lush fecundity of the country, with its ethereal beauty existing side-by-side with the most base and elemental realities of human life, is very nearly a character in its own right. The sex scenes reflect that dichotomy, ranging from erotic to brutal – often simultaneously. If the author could tame her love affair with pretentious language and take a harder look at the hypocrisy of the society in which Pippa was formed, this could be a memorable novel. As it is, one can only list it as a valiant attempt that is ultimately dragged down by its own weight.… (mehr)