A slim volume for a family saga that spans generations and continents- and it could have, should have been longer. That's a rare statement for me but this didn't flesh out the characters enough to make them sympathetic. Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC. Over to others.

Acker's attempt to dissect immigrant families' dynamics by telling the story of an Indian immigrant family protagonist of this story, falls short of the depth necessary to really dive into the human psyche. While the read in enjoyable and evokes in the readers feelings of anger and injustice, the development of the characters feels too superficial.

I enjoyed this book book a lot and thought it had great promise. It was entertaining and very interesting. The blurb initially jumped out at me and the story pushed me to read on. Secret children, hidden relationships, honesty denied. It would work marvellously as a movie also, one along the lines of The Kite Runner or a Thousand Splendid Suns. Some of the characters jumped out at me and some were quite insipid. With a little more editing and some more depth added to the characters I think it could be a truly great read.

Well written engaging characters tat drew me inI really enjoy well written historical fiction this one kept e turning the pages.#netgalley#delphiniumbooks

This book covers the story of four generations of immigrants and, through their lives, we gain insights into British colonialism and its longstanding aftermath. There is some unevenness in the narrative style as the story progresses but, overall, the characters are interesting enough to keep our attention throughout. A book that definitely deserves more attention than it has received thus far.

Listen, this right here is one of my favorite stories and I don't know whether the author knew of this but there is a Chandaria family which is quite well known in Kenya- we've even got Chandaria industries. Now, I love how candid and unapologetic these characters are and while reading this you do not expect to warm up to any character, but rather you find yourself assessing the situation and experiencing life as they are. I like this kind of reading because it takes me away from sentimentality whilst exposing me to reality.
Four generations, secrets, different political times and major decisions made force this family back home to Nairobi to come clean and heal.
Thank you Netgalley for the eARC.

"The Limits of the World".is a sad and very hard reading.
Despite the long time I spent to finish this book, I did not feel the need to leave it away.

The writing style used by the author is direct. Characters are "harsh", anxious and full of doubts and uncertainty which make the reader have no compassion or sorrow for their misfortune.
Even though it is not the kind of literature I usually read, I was intersted by the topics addressed by this book. Immigration, tolerance and integration in a new society are current and sensitive issues.

Despite that I lived for more than 10 years in East Africa, I learnt more about Indian who came to the region. In this direction, the novel was informative and educational.

My rating is 2.5*

I liked the story of this book but I found it hard to read. The narration was flat and distant. I did not connect with any of the characters and it felt like they didn't really come to fill fruition.

I just wasn’t able to finish this one due to the slow pace and lack of....well, intrigue. I don’t need a plot driven book in the sense of genre fiction like mysteries or thrillers, just the promise that either something will happen or I will be made to care that nothing is happening. I enjoyed the style and I will try another from this author.

After multiple attempts to read and finish this book, I finally did. Arriving in the United States from Nairobi, the Indian Chandaria family have made a great American life. But there are secrets kept that will affect Sunil, working on his PhD at Harvard. Sunil has secrets of his own. Interesting to read of the vagaries of the human spirit and the choices we make. I found this book difficult and a little boring to get into...only my opinion.

Great read. The author wrote a story that was interesting and moved at a pace that kept me engaged. The characters were easy to invest in.

Years after Urmila and Premchand married in Nairobi, merging two Indian families that had emigrated to east Africa, the couple made a new home for themselves in Columbus, Ohio. Thirty years on and Urmila's still homesick. Running her Authentic African Giftshop gives her great pleasure, if not wealth or even financial solvency; and funding said retail venture with his medical career doesn't thrill husband Premchand, but with their 30-yr old son Sunil still a student in Boston, distance seems to suit the entire family of three - geographically, emotionally, and metaphorically. Just as Sunil and his Jewish-American girlfriend Amy decide to marry, and only two weeks away from his dissertation deadline, Sunil's mother calls him urgently back home to Nairobi, to the hospital bedside of a brother he never even knew he had.

Jennifer Acker delves into multi-cultural layers of family grudges and secretly harbored hurts, isolation in its many forms, and modern day pressures worldwide. Throughout it all, Kenyan history from the Mau Mau terror to the rise of the KANU party's leader Kenyatta is artfully interwoven with the family's own drama, via the so-called senile grandfather.

I love that the author and her husband Nishi Shah resemble Amy and Sunil, and I love this line: Fareh teh chareh. He who roams advances.

I was intrigued by the premise of this book. However, I found it hard to get through and it was a bit slow.

I would like to thank Netgalley and the publisher for providing me with a copy free of charge. This is my honest and unbiased opinion of it.

I had some difficulty getting through this book. I enjoyed learning about the Indian community in Kenya, however I had to make myself finish reading this. Some parts were good, others were too dry.

This was well written and I love the cover but it almost felt like a chore to read. I felt like the characters fell flat although I did enjoy the cultural aspect.

The Limits Of The World unfortunately fell short of what I expected. It's an intriguing premise, and the story is informative in some aspects. In other ways, however, the story is dull and lacking a spark. It's good but not great. I wouldn't read it again. Thanks to NetGalley for an arc in exchange for an honest review.

I wasn't able to get into this one. I didn't finish it. I found it confusing and lackluster. The writing style didn't work for me.

This is kind of a difficult book to review for me. It’s a terrifically written and very ambitious fictional debut, unquestionably. That the entire experience has been sort of frustrating for me because I so strongly disliked one of the main characters just seems…like a sort of pedestrian aside. And yet…there it is. So then I figured I’ll just review separate aspects of the book, of which so many are so very good. This is an immigrant story first and foremost, it’s about belonging or not belonging within a community, family, country. The immigrant family here are Kenyan Indians as in people from India who have moved to Nairobi and created an enclave for themselves back when both countries were under British control. In fact, there is a narrative story that provides a historical record of this and it was for me by far the best, most interest aspect of the book. I learned something new. I wasn’t aware of the Indian community in Kenya nor how they lived, their lives in fact comparable to the Jewish plot in prewar Europe, which is to say there were given no land so they turned to commerce and their success in business enterprises have led to the resentment by the locals. But essentially these were people without a country…they didn’t think they had the opportunities back in India, Kenya wasn’t especially welcoming (there was no political representation for them, etc.) and once the British left, they didn’t really want their Indian subjects to follow. So it must have been insanely difficult to live that way and yet…the community seems to have managed. But at the center of this story is one family that immigrated again, this time to America and about how they did or did not adjust to that. All radical adjustments like that are difficult, but it seems to me that is especially the case when one comes from a very traditional i.e. restrictive i.e. backward culture. The second generation Americanizes and does great, but the first generations…it’s just too difficult. Especially for Urmila, wife, mother, business owner…and the character I positively loathed. And the thing is the book centers on her, it goes to great lengths to describe her thought processes and explain her behaviors, but in the end of the day she’s emotionally distant, unpleasant, difficult, unable or unwilling to adapt and especially a failure at being a wife, mother and business owner. So much so that the end of the book sees her returning to Nairobi just so she can be once again among the familiar ways of life. I suppose her son (well, both of them) are the successes of the story, because what Urmila represents doesn’t bode well for women or immigrants or even people in general. Her self pity, the learned helpless quality, the unreasonable stubbornness are extremely offputting. The fact that she goes back to Nairobi (where someone close to her has recently been butchered on the street for no reason), the fact that anyone would move from US to Kenya is just further prove of her lack of reason. Ok, but aside from that…there were other, much more compelling, likeable and interesting characters in this book. There were terrific descriptions, fascinating historical facts, very emotionally engaging dramatic writing. The story of Sunil (the son) and his white Jewish American wife that so threw his mother was in fact, great, a realistically done representation of modern young family. The cultural juxtapositions were very well done. And the book had something of an epic quality to it, spinning several generations and continents. It read like one too, the page count is listed at 250 and either that’s off or it’s the longest 250 page fictional book I’ve read, it seemed way longer than that. Overall, well done and interesting, but some readers might find it too heavy and slow. From the afterword it seemed like the author might have utilizes some personal experiences for this book, which is possibly what gave it such a realistic quality. Thanks Netgalley.

Orientalist ~ Academic ~ Thorough

tl;dr: family extends over continents and generations

This book was well-written if without much emotion. I couldn't point to a particular sentence out of whack or any stylistic problem. However, it was devoid of feeling. The characters felt sort of wooden, like someone knew their story from research but didn't know how to make them breathe. There was so much that could have been good in this book. It's ambition was to be like Allende or Lahiri, but instead it was like an exercise in strong, boring writing. I do also wonder if the author had any person connection to her subject. Her only character that had any emotional weight was a white academic who was in a relationship with the Indian-American character. I wondered if that was her, and why she could do that character some justice. Overall, not worth the effort to read.

Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.