THE GIRL IN THE GARDEN

Anitha Gandhi has a lovely voice and the perfect accent for this story of family secrets uncovered during an American girl’s summer visit with her mother’s family in India. There’s a fairy-tale quality to Rakhee’s adventures when she disobeys her aunties and ventures at dawn into the jungle behind the family house. Nair’s story is winning, an updated SECRET GARDEN. But in Gandhi's garden a hospital is always a “hospill” and “couldn’t have” is always “coun’v,” and her syllable-swallowing haste has nothing to do with narrative pace. Nor does she interpret sentences with great attention to sense. Surely clearer direction from the producers could have helped. What’s here is unfair to the author, and perhaps to the narrator as well. B.G. © AudioFile 2011, Portland, Maine [Published: SEPTEMBER 2011]