Washington Post: I have been exhorting all my friends to read this breathtakingly gorgeous book, but it is nearly impossible to summarize. Two sisters, Myung and Laleh, live inside the whale of babel, which swims through space and contains an entire universe inside its skin — but Myung is determined to leave the whale and see the universe beyond. Myung’s quest leads her to the story of two other sisters, Wisa and Magali, who live on Esi, a shape-shifting island that descends into barbaric chaos once every century.
“The Mad Sisters of Esi,” already an award winner in India, is dreamlike in the best possible way, crammed with haunting images and mind-blowing ideas on every page. In Mehta’s telling, madness takes on many meanings, including an ability to see the past and future as well as a hunger to create worlds, and the fear of it is used to enforce conformity. But when the story takes us to another island where everyone claims to be mad, they are just as conformist and rigid, obsessed with control.
At the heart of the story is the pair of sisters, separated and searching for each other, using time travel, ghost visitations, dreams and storytelling to reconnect. When the landscape changes like water, and time can be reshaped, all people have is one another. “Sister is a careful word,” Mehta writes. “You have to love and hate each other … You have to be slightly mad to love like that.” Theirs is a journey of ongoing loss, and sadness takes a central role: Even unraveling the mysteries of the whale becomes cause for mourning, because, as Mehta observes, things lose their power when you understand them. “The Mad Sisters of Esi” both demands and rewards a second reading, and it is a strong contender for the year’s best novel.