•Indian author-debut novel
The Color of Our Sky is a fictionalized portrait of India’s devdasis – servants of god. They are lower caste women who, from a prepubescent age, serve as prostitutes in the name of god. Traditionally it was a revered position. Today, these women are shunned by the culture that created them. The plight of these women is fraught with abuse and murder, and is ripe with opportunities for child trafficking.
Trasi handles her subject matter with the care and passion it deserves and clearly has skill for her craft. I liked her writing style, yet two things kept gnawing away at me as I read her novel. First, she has the tendency to get carried away with her prose, rendering it overtly melodramatic. Second, despite all thematic twists and turns, the ending was easy to predict. How Trasi deals with this in her future work will ultimately define her writing as genre fiction or literary fiction, both valid forms of fiction. A praiseworthy debut novel.
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