June Book Review: Shine, Coconut Moon

Neesha Meminger's Shine, Coconut Moon

Meminger tries to stay relevant. That much is clear.

She drops more pop-culture references than you can shake a [insert awful, reality-television-show/Paris Hilton sex-video/Gossip Girl-reference here] at. It’s a block party, and everyone gets a shout-out: Ludacris, Adam Sandler, Project Runway and pig-out sessions. Don’t forget Alicia Keys, U2, India.Arie, and of course, the all-knowing, all-seeing Wikipedia.

The thing is - it works for her for audience: teenage girls facing questions of identity and sexuality and re-reading Are You There God? It’s me, Margaret for the third time. By flashlight. Underneath their comforter. They eat it up. The success of Twilight and Gossip Girls (the books) prove it.

But if she focused as much attention on creating real, believable conflict as she did on staying relevant, Shine would be a much more compelling piece of fiction. Instead, our author gets so caught up in delivering her message, she forgets she’s creating a story.

Shine is the examination of a coconut, an Indian-American straddling the fence between her culture and acceptance as a white-bread-fed American. Our protagonist, Samar, has remained blissfully unaware of her Sikh culture until post-9/11, when her uncle arrives on her doorstep, eager to mend old wounds, and shows Samar the Indian heritage her mother tried so hard to keep out of her life.

As Samar finds herself drawn to those ties, as well as an understanding of who she is, tensions rise in her relationships with her friends, her boyfriend, and her mother. They begin to realize Samar isn’t the same person anymore. And so does she.

Meminger deftly handles Samar’s internal conflict, and her journey to understand her culture. Raised by a mother who left no trace of Indian heritage in their household, we feel for her curiosity, her defiance, her desire to know who she is.

It’s the external conflicts that falls flat. For a novel whose premise is tolerance and mutual understanding between cultures, its view of the antagonists is awfully one-dimensional, almost stereotypical: drunk, working-class white males who throw garbage at passing Middle Easterners, and try to take advantage of Samar in a parking lot.

Not that these people don’t exist - they do.

And not that there’s such a thing as a “good reason” for racial or sexual harassment - there isn’t. But in the minds of the antagonists, there is motivation. Right or wrong, these boys had a method to their madness. The author touches upon it briefly; a one-liner about someone losing work to outsourced labor. There’s no real attempt to give these characters depth, though - so instead of a truly compelling story about the racial tension post-9/11, we get more of “The Good Guys versus The Bad Guys,” and as Shine tries to point out, nothing’s ever that simple.

Despite these shortcomings, there’s no question anyone who struggled to find their own identity amidst their peers could relate to Samar’s story. In five, ten years, the pop-culture references will be out of date. But the premise will be as relevant as ever.

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

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