The litany of names starts off as a 5-minute bulletin. By the time it comes around to the first week of November there will be 1400 daily messages of girls lost and found, using up to 3 hours of airtime." I felt that the last part of this novel was more of a "misery, begets misery, begets misery, begets misery, etc." We know. She did not understand that her setting and time period spoke to that implicitly without having to overexplain or emphasize. There is an interview with Razak at telegraphindia.com in which she explains why she wrote this book and how she came to the book’s title: Alma is 14 and anticipating her wedding. Although her parents are educated, her father progressive and her mother operating with a degree of autonomy, married is the safest place in a land where females who are raped kill themselves to maintain familial honor. And it is nearly impossible to not be raped. Bappu/Bhai is a rather timid dreamer - increasingly unable to reconcile his idealistic view of a tolerant household and society with the terrible sectarian hatred and violence around him. His one moment of bravery was went he went with bribes to rescue the house cook Dilchain from her in-laws after her abusive husband burnt himself to death trying to kill her – a rescue motivated partly by principle and partly by love of her cooking and which leads to some unrequired love for him from Dilchain (who as the higher caste family members lose their way in the horrors of partition increasingly leads the family from below).

The term has come to have a second, idiomatic use, indicative of a person who reads a great deal or to perceived excess: someone who devours books metaphorically. British and Irish moths: an illustrated guide to selected difficult species. Martin Townsend, Jon Clifton & Brian Goodey, 2010. Information and photographs of 72 difficult to identify macro-moths, which often require close examination or genitalia determination. Butterfly Conservation. Ma and Bappu are liberal intellectuals teaching at the local university. Their fourteen year-old daughter – precocious, headstrong Alma– is soon to be married: Alma is mostly interested in the wedding shoes and in spinning wild stories for her beloved younger sister Roop, a restless child obsessed with death. Alma is the daughter of two professors, coming from an educated upper class family, you'd expect her fate to be reaching for the stars. Instead, the stars are literally dictating her future. When her horoscope predicts ill, her well-intentioned grandmother lies to get her a good marriage match. This sets off a series of events that tears her family apart. Set in the time of Partition and Indian Independence, we get a deep dive into the turmoil of the time, especially the impact on women's rights. a b "Identifying and controlling clothes moths, carpet beetles and silverfish". Department of Primary Industries and Regional Development . Retrieved April 6, 2018.Ma & Bappu do their best to shield Roop and Alma from the horrors beyond their walls, but the sounds infiltrate their every thought. As the days pass their freedom becomes more curtailed and their future takes on a very different hue. To protect their family they take a few different measures but, with the city and the country in complete turmoil, the family is ultimately affected in the most unimaginable way and their peaceful life is destroyed forever.

I would have given this book five stars if it weren't for one glaring flaw: the unnecessary use of "star power." Now, I understand that a lay person who has never heard of The Moth probably won't be enticed by this book at a bookstore until they read "Malcolm Gladwell" or "Darrell 'DMC' McDaniels" or another famous name on the cover. Unfortunately, just because they're famous doesn't mean they can write, and even if they're writers, that doesn't mean they can tell a short story. In my opinion, these "celebrity" authored pieces were the weakest in the collection. However, as a marketer myself, I understand the reasoning behind it--I just don't like it.The term is also used idiomatically to describe an avid or voracious reader, [17] or a bibliophile. In its earliest iterations, it had a negative connotation, referring to someone who would rather read than participate in the world around them. Over the years its meaning has drifted in a more positive direction. [18] See also [ edit ] The book contains 50 stories that they promise aren't necessarily the best, but are those that lend themselves well to the written word, with only light editing. These stories are taken from the mainstage show and thus are told by the likes of President Clinton's press secretary, astronaut Michael Massimino, rapper Run DMC, and others. Although these stories had at their core values we can all relate to — being alone, being afraid — I still found it a bit hard to penetrate the world of celebrity. (That some of the stories are by Moth staff, and the book has a preface, a forward, and an introduction, further contributes to the self-congratulatory air.) The first collection from celebrated storytelling phenomenon The Moth presents fifty spellbinding, soul-bearing stories selected from their extensive archive.

Moth was my final book, of 10, from the Desmond Elliott long list. This has been an excellent list of debut novels that I have really enjoyed working my way through over the last few weeks.

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If you are ready for something different, and/or if you are in the mood to give a friend a fabulous gift, grab a copy of The Moth. I promise that you will be glad you did. Story tellers range from Darryl of Run DMC, to acclaimed reporter, one of 2005 Time Magazine's 100 Most Influential People, Malcolm Gladwell. We hear from an airline stewardess, a man who worked a record-setting four years as a volunteer for a suicide hot-line, and the one that I've retold the most: a dad, desperately trying to communicate with his teen-aged son and grossly misunderstanding, therefore constantly misusing, "LOL". Moth is a story of resilience & courage. It is a very forceful read, one that is both heart-breaking and fascinating. I was, and am, very ignorant of those years in India’s history. The brutality and inhumanity of man against man is unimaginable to my mind. In creating this close-knit family with all their eccentricities and foibles, Melody Razak gives the reader a snapshot into a time when there was so much dread, so much pain, yet the domestic rituals were maintained where possible to instil a sense of normality and to help cope with the intense fear that lingered in the mind of all. There is something here for everyone, no matter where your interest may lie. These fascinating stories evoke all kinds of emotions - they are by turns heartstoppingly tense, devastatingly sad and hysterically funny. But they all share a common theme of hope, no matter what situation the narrator finds themself in.

This revised and now comprehensive edition is an essential part of the library of any moth- or butterfly enthusiast.And so this British-Iranian woman immersed herself in the history and literature of the period: fixing on objects ( a cooking pot, a quilt sewn with tiny mirrors, resembling a sea of stars), talismans of an entire world that is about to be destroyed. We are thrown into a community of rich and unique characters, Hindu and Muslim, Brahmin and lower-caste, male and female, children and adults. The cherished daughter of an intellectual Brahmin family, Alma, just fourteen and about to be married off when the novel begins, is the main character. Intelligent, observant, compassionate, yet convincingly adolescent, she is an ideal guide, but the two characters whom I found most compelling were Roop, Alma's feral five-year-old sister, and her Kashmiri mother, Ma, a woman ". . . almost too advanced for her age, too intelligent, too liberal," as Razak said in that Telegraph of India interview, "[who] was always going to be punished for just being 100 years too early. She was going to get burnt. Because there was no society to help hold a woman like her at that point in time,” A stunning display of writing by pupils at Harrow Gate Academy, whose teachers used Moth as part of CLPE’s Power of Reading Children from years 1 & 2 at Egremont Primary have created some wonderful work. Their last few moths flew up today. Well done! Remember to submit your questions for me via the Great Science Share! I look forward to answering them! Moth Hall of Fame