The Most Precious Substance on Earth

April 25, 2022
Bhat (The Family Took Shape) balances humor and pathos in this savvy coming-of-age story set in Halifax, Nova Scotia. At 14, bright, funny Nina crushes on her English teacher and loses her virginity to him. While her parents pray to Hindu gods and goddesses, Nina hangs out with her best friend, Amy, cutting classes and sharing inside jokes. After Amy drops out and leaves home, Nina’s life implodes: she attends college, but struggles academically and later drops out of a graduate creative writing program. After she finds work as a 10th grade English teacher, one of the boys in her class insists on carrying her bag and writes about her in a class assignment, which triggers the trauma caused by her high school English teacher, the complete details of which Bhat keeps murky until late in the narrative. The ending feels a bit open, but Bhat offers memorable prose (describing Amy, Nina narrates, “her hugs have a soothing weight, like an X-ray blanket”) and does an exceptional job revealing the turmoil under Nina’s placid facade as she navigates dating, socializing, and the downward trajectory of her career. It adds up to a bold statement about the impact of a young woman’s trauma. Agent: Stephanie Sinclair, CookeMcDermid Agency. (June)Correction: An earlier version of this review misstated the book's title. This reviews has also been updated to clarify a plot point.

May 1, 2022
Bhat's candid novel follows Indian Canadian teenager Nina from ninth grade through her mid-30s as she slowly comes to terms with a devastating secret. In 1990s Halifax, Nina is an awkward 14-year-old dealing with her loving but often worried parents, who are pious Hindus; her growing alienation from her best friend; and an experience with a teacher, the consequences of which will continue to ripple beneath the surface of her life for years. The novel, which is divided into 13 impeccably titled, short story-like chapters including "Why I Read Beowulf" and "You Are Loved By Me," follows Nina as she goes in and out of an MFA program in Baltimore, teaches high school English (which is sometimes "almost a high" and other times "like being an air traffic controller--just...too much"), and joins Toastmasters to try to manage her self-loathing. She navigates the alternately cringey and threatening world of modern dating with guys who would "take whatever [they] could." Bhat approaches her weighty subject matter with grace and humor and, in doing so, finds a way of exploring trauma that is both realistic and tender. Unlike other coming-of-age novels that focus on the teenage or young adult years, in this one Bhat takes readers downstream and examines how those pivotal times continue to shape the protagonist as she approaches middle age. Suffused with pop-culture references including To Catch a Predator and the iconic line "We are the weirdos, Mister," from the 1996 film The Craft, the novel could also be a parable for a modern world struggling to come to terms with its own secrets amid the reverberations of the #MeToo movement. An empowering and liberatory coming-of-age novel for "the girls who stay quiet."

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May 1, 2022
Bhat's portrait of Nina, a young girl from an Indian immigrant family growing up in Halifax, Nova Scotia, moves quickly from its irreverent opening tone to big plot developments. Nina's experiences in high school, her relationship with her parents and her best friend Amy, her subsequent return as a high-school English teacher--all map the steady progress of a young woman carrying a deep secret into adulthood. This coming-of-age-novel references the complexities of growing up in a Hindu family in Nova Scotia without resorting to slick stereotypes, while Nina's Hindu Christmas pageant embodies her casual amalgam of influences without overt analysis of her feelings about her immigrant identity. Bhat captures the moods of each stage of Nina's life as she moves from high school to grad school to her working and dating life. Youthful curiosity, the desire to be cool, the self-focus of teenagers, and the ensuing period of self-doubt and a quest for life's purpose are universal. Bhat succeeds admirably and enjoyably in balancing dramatic moments and comic asides while maintaining the emotional integrity of a character grappling with confusing contexts.

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August 12, 2022

DEBUT Indian Canadian Bhat's debut about the rocky coming of age of an Indian Canadian young woman is disarming, disquieting, and filled with 1990s nostalgia nuggets. Told in choppy, time-hopping vignettes, the novel follows Nina from her first year of high school, where she's crushed out on her English teacher and trying to hold on to her best friend Amy, to her return to her parents' house after a breakdown at a U.S. college creative writing program. The possible cause of the breakdown might be the casually brutal assault by the same English teacher when Nina was 14. This incident is barely mentioned, but it reverberates through all of Nina's encounters with men, most of whom are awful, clueless, or at the very least "all wrong" for her. Nina's wry observations of school, friendships, Canadian cross-cultural exchanges, and family dynamics elevate the story. VERDICT Like My Dark Vanessa by Kate Elizabeth Russell, Bhat's novel shows how life-altering and destructive sexual abuse can be. Unlike the protagonist of Russell's book, Nina is less obsessed and broken, but damaged nonetheless.--Liz French

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