If I had been a boy, my birth in a bountiful year would have marked me as lucky, a child with a special destiny to fulfill. But daughters were curses. A daughter had to be married off before she could enter heaven, and dowries beggared families for generations. Gods with infinite memories visited girl children on women who needed to be punished for sins committed in other incarnations. Bharati Mukherjee's novel is another one of those multicultural stories of alienation and hybrid identity. The protagonist, Jyoti or Jasmine Vijh, is born in a small Indian village with very little to hope for in life. She becomes one of the lucky ones to find a husband whom she loves. He dreams of getting a job in America while she is still struggling with the modern idea of calling him by his first name. After being widowed at seventeen, Jasmine decides to leave her home country and make her way to America. Getting there illegally from the other side of the world is anything but easy, but so...