(Weidenfeld & Nicolson, $34.99)
If you are looking for a cute, funny, heart-warming read from the same author who brought you the Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, so am I. Its name is The Crowning Glory of Calla Lily Ponder and I was half way through it before it went walkabout somewhere between Sydney and Queensland’s Gold Coast.Somewhat pushed for a book to read and review in its absence, I quickly chose The Blue Note Book because it was only 205 pages.
Cute and funny it ain’t. But for a short book it sure packs one heck of a punch.
Batuk is a 15-year-old oumbai prostitute living in a cage where she’s been “making sweet-cakes” since her father sold her when she was nine. See what I mean about not being cute and funny?
The men she makes sweet-cakes with are usually foul-smelling, ugly and often cruel. This is not Julia-Roberts-in-Pretty-Woman-style prostitution: it’s the real world where a human life has little value. Girls like Batuk go from cages to the dump every minute of the day without anyone batting an eyelid.
What she has that others don’t, however, is a notebook and the ability to write in it. As Batuk’s miserable life unfolds, so does her story, in her own words. Thanks to letting her soul roam free from her tortured body, she still somehow manages to capture the beauty of being an imaginative child.
Amazingly, this debut novel was written by a famous medical professor from the prestigious oayo Clinic in the US. While lecturing in India for the United Nations, he saw a girl like Batuk writing in a journal in the real Street of Cages in oumbai. Struck by her dignity and haunted by her for years, he eventually wrote this remarkable story.
Published by the same editor as The Kite Runner, The Blue Note Book is just as powerful. It’s real life at its worst – and most compelling.
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