Character-driven stories stay with reader

Sometimes a novel is good because of its complex plot structure, its sophisticated symbolism, or its sweeping dimension. But other times, a novel that seems less important than a literary masterpiece is good because its characters swirl around in our heads long after we’ve closed the book.

One example of the latter is Dolen Perkins-Valdez’s new novel, “Take My Hand,” which is told through two chronologies. In 1973, Civil Townsend, fresh out of nursing school, goes to work in a Montgomery, Alabama family planning clinic. Two of her first clients are sisters, Erica and India, whom Civil is supposed to give birth control shots to. Civil is stunned to learn that the girls are just eleven and thirteen years old.

Neither girl is sexually active, and India hasn’t even started her period. So troubled by the situation, Civil stops giving the girls their shots. When the clinic's director finds out, she takes the girls to the hospital and has them sterilized.

The story is framed by Civil’s narrative in 2016 as she travels back to Montgomery to visit Erica and India, who has been diagnosed with cancer. Civil recalls the guilt she felt about what happened to the girls and how she unwittingly contributed to their tragedy.

The book does a good job of presenting the historical facts about the government-funded sterilizations and the lawsuit that revealed that over 150,000 low-income women were sterilized under federally funded programs and that 55 percent of these were teens. Ironically, this revelation came just one year after the public learned of the Tuskegee syphilis experiments, in which Black men were intentionally left untreated for syphilis.

“Take My Hand” examines the emotional toll on the women and girls who were coerced or tricked into sterilization and their families. The story is rich in ideas of freedom, justice, and autonomy. The book is a quick read, and the accessible prose makes this a good novel for both adult and young adult audiences.

Another set of characters still swimming in my brain are from Namrata Patel’s debut novel, “The Candid Life of Meena Dave,” which launches June 1. Adopted and then orphaned, Meena feels alone and rootless in the world. As a free-lance photojournalist, Meena travels the world and has no fixed address other than a friend’s rented spare room. She convinces herself that this is all she needs or will ever want, that she doesn’t need the same interpersonal connections of close friends or family that others have.

She returns to the US from six months abroad to find that she has inherited an apartment from someone she’s never met or even heard of. She moves into the apartment, intending to stay just long enough to sell it, when she begins finding cryptic notes from her benefactor, Neha.

Meena begins to suspect that Neha has some connection to her birth family and sets out to discover the truth about her background. She starts to see similarities between herself, with her dark hair and brown skin, and the other residents of the building, all Indian Americans.

But Meena also learns that Neha doesn’t like people—she says as much in her notes—and that she did not even love her husband. In fact, Neha admits that she’s never felt love for anyone.

Neha is the true embodiment of what Meena has convinced herself that she herself is: without any emotional connection to other people. Meena is shocked and saddened by Neha’s lack of human feeling. Objectively, Meena is nothing like Neha. She loved her parents dearly, she does have one friend she truly enjoys being with, and she finds herself attracted to Sam, the young game designer in the building.

When she starts to suspect that she may actually have a heritage and a family, she finds herself longing for things she has previously dismissed as unnecessary.

The other residents of the building are three “aunties,” who are best friends and into everyone’s business. The aunties walk into her apartment, which they insist she keep unlocked, whenever they like, but they also teach her to make chai and how to wrap a sari.

The story is sweet and funny, and if a 30-something woman can be said to be “coming of age,” then it is a coming-of-age novel, too. Most importantly, Meena learns how to let other people into her heart after the trauma of losing her parents. She also learns to see things for the way they are instead of how she would like them to be. It is just this kind of small story that leaves us thinking about the characters for weeks and months.