I wanted to like this novel more. Historical fiction can be a hit or miss in terms of my personal taste. The story was well written and the characters were engaging p, but the overall story felt so sterile and wooden. I don’t think I was the target audience but I think a lot of readers will find this more compelling than I did.

I thought this book was good, not great. There were definitely some interesting elements that reflected on a variety of topics across politics, colonialism, race, class, and the caste system. The one topic that I found fascinating was feminism from the perspective of Cora and how her relationship with Indra impacted how he began to view the world - someone who comes from a patriarchal society.

The Indian resistance movement which is a major theme of the book felt like a background narrative to me.

Overall, a pretty decent novel.

A well-researched and carefully crafted historical novel. Batsha's second novel surpasses his first in many ways. Most importantly, in addition to his attention to lesser-known aspects of world history, he has given us a truly American novel here. I will add a link to an interview shortly.

A Bomb Placed Close to the Heart by Nishant Batsha (book cover is in image) is the story of how Cora Trent and Indra Mukherjee meet, fall in love and struggle to reconcile the racial struggles they face in their interracial marriage. While I was interested in the story itself, this was such a slow burn and had such uneven pacing I found myself struggling to stay engaged.

I had the good fortune of having both the ALC and ARC. I found myself going back to the narration by Vikas Adam because it was so well done, and was the reason why I did not DNF this book.

Thank you @harperaudio, @eccobooks and @netgalley for the opportunity to listen to this ALC and read this eARC. All opinions are my own.

#HarperAudio
#EccoBooks
#ABombPlacedClosetotheHeart
#NishatBatsha
#VikasAdam
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This is a beautifully written novel about WW1 following Cora an activist is dabbles in the themes of love, loyalty, freedom. It was a little slow even for the lit fiction side, it took me a minute to really get into the story but once I was in it, I enjoyed it. I learned a lot about WW1 you always get books based on ww2 so it was refreshing to say the least.

I initially wasn’t sure where this one was going but with the slice of history it reflected that I hadn’t known or thought about much and the way it handled how life didn’t always turn out as planned, this one really ended up growing on me. It was tender and captured the naiveté of youth and idealism and the realities of the world well.

I am glad that I decided to continue reading this! At first, it was hard to get pulled in, but about 1/4 of the way through I started enjoying.

I found the writing style a bit hard to follow, making it a bit harder to connect with characters.

I thought the history this was based on was really interesting, and it wasn’t a part of history I really knew about.

I had high hopes for this book. I generally adore fiction from or about the subcontinent, and this one promised a peek into an era not frequently touched upon in fiction, at least as far as I'm aware. However, I found this book to be quite over-written, too wordy. Here's an example of a sentence that made me roll my eyes: "She was one of the two Americans in that room, but, at that time, she didn't feel it, realizing instead that everything heretofore had been a pitiful meandering, as if she were some mewling calf hungry for the sweetgrass, unsure in every step as to where it grew." Bear in mind - she had just walked into a frat party where she met Indra. Good grief.

I ended up skimming a great deal of this book. I wish it had been written by a slightly more laconic author, because the story it attempted to tell really does need to be told.

3.5 stars rounded up. The novel takes place in 1915 on the eve of WWI, beginning in California and moving on from there to New York. The two main characters are Indra, lately released from a year in jail in India for political agitation against the Raj, and Cora, a miner's daughter who is now working on her Master's on a feminist playwright. When Indra and Cora meet at a party near Stanford, sparks fly both physically and intellectually. Cora has a way with words, helping Indra see new ways of expressing the plight of the Indian people. Indra has a contact with the Germans, which he hopes will help his cause by shipping arms to India for the resistance. The closer war comes, the more tenuous their positions become. Once married, their lives are tied together as their individual goals diverge. There is a lot of deep thinking in this novel, including racism, the right to self-govern, regime change, marriage, masculine assumptions (both in India and in the US) and the pressure on women to sacrifice.
This is a literary novel, and it isn't one to rush through. I found the writing a cut above most fiction, but at times a little complex. I enjoyed learning about this little known episode about an early wave of Indian immigrants to the US.

Thanks to Ecco and NetGalley for providing this book in exchange for my honest review.

fun, poignant, and interesting book with great plotting and interesting themes. would definitely recommend. 5 stars. tysm for the arc.

A young Indian man, active in his country's independence movement, falls in love at first sight with a young white woman in 1917 California. Slow moving and repetitive.

This story was interesting, and it definitely picked up about 2/3ds of the way through. But I did kind of find it a slog to get through. The writing style wasn’t really to my taste!

Thanks to Netgalley and Ecco for the ebook. Cora is a student at Stanford in 1917 when she meets Indra, a revolutionary whose escaped India. The two get swept up in a young love and join the protests of the day. When war is declared, America goes after dissidents and the two escape to New York City, only to find that there’s nowhere to hide. A beautiful story of how the initial innocence of love can transform into something much deep.