A Great Country is an Indigo Heather’s Pick and has an interesting-sounding plot, which is why I decided to read it, but this novel ended up falling flat for me.

A Great Country is about the Indian American Shah family: parents, Priya and Ashok, who immigrated to the US twenty years ago as newlyweds in order to pursue post-secondary education, and their three children, Deepa, their oldest child at sixteen, middle child Maya, and their youngest child, eleven-year-old Ajay. After decades of hard work, Priya and Ashok have moved their family up in the world and settled in the exclusive, predominately white gated community of Pacific Hills, California.

Happy to have finally “made it”, Priya and Ashok’s hard-earned life comes crashing down when Ajay is brutalized and arrested by the police, who think he is Muslim and older than he is. Priya and Ashok are understandably upset that their eleven-year-old child has been beaten up and arrested by the police, but they are also baffled by their son being a target of racial profiling, and this is why my sympathy for Priya and Ashok is limited, because they seem to have brought their caste-system prejudice with them from India and believe that they are the “model minority” that should not be lumped in with riff-raff like Black and Hispanic people. Those are the kind of people that get arrested by police, not hardworking Indians.

Their daughter, Deepa, an activist who is more clued into racial inequity than her parents, tries to explain the realities of US society to them, but parents don’t like listening to their kids. Instead, as Priya and Ashok navigate the legalities of Ajay’s arrest and the media attention that comes with it, they eventually learn for themselves that all the hard work in the world is not going to help them become fully accepted into white society.

A Great Country is the type of story that I usually appreciate getting to experience, but for me it falls short of being a great book because of Gowda’s style of writing. To me, it is clinical and emotionless, like I am being told how the various members of the Shah family feel without actually getting to feel what they feel for myself.