Cover reveal: the newest novel by New Fiction author Mohanalakshmi Rajakumar

An Unlikely Goddess 

launched October 14, 2013. From Mohanalakshmi Rajakumar, winner of the SheWrites New Novelist Award, 2011

…The Hindu goddess, Sita, is said to have been born from the Earth.

King Janaka discovers the beautiful infant and in her beauty, believes in her divinity. He raises her as his own daughter……

A coming of age story, An Unlikely Goddess centres on Sita, the daughter of South Asian immigrants, growing up in all the wrong places. From Hinduism to Christianity, Brad to Naren, she's looking for love but gets anything but.

Excerpt:

Unlike her namesake, Sita's first mistake was being born.

     A girl, her mother thought, eyes dark in abject terror. What if he leaves me? She swallowed, increasing the dryness in her post-delivery mouth, the stiches across her abdomen itching. No water. Only ice chips until her bowels passed the tests. Mythili pressed back against the pillows. She closed her eyes, pushing her fingers into the sockets until the darkness was punctuated by bone-white stars. She wished she could as easily tune out the gurgles of the baby in the bassinet beside her.

Yet, even premature and unwanted, Sita was obliviously happy to enter the world, beaming her infant smile at anyone or anything she saw: the nurse, her aunt, her mother's back, the noxiously-pink cement walls of the Madras hospital in which she found herself. Several pounds underweight, she was otherwise fine—a petite, brown-skinned baby with tufts of black hair crowning a smooth scalp. How could she be expected to know that from her first breath she was, and always would be, a living reminder of her mother's failure to produce a first-born male heir?

       Though swaddled and placed in the bassinet immediately after delivery, her eyes were alive with motion. She blinked up at the faces of passersby, but they were admittedly few, so instead, she followed the blinking lights, the creeping shadows and the occasional appearance of a nurse. Everything about the world kept her busy with delight until sleep washed over her little body.

“Look at that smile,” the young nurse said, cradling Sita against her flat bosom.

“Aamam,” Priya, the childless aunt, agreed, rubbing a forefinger across the baby’s somewhat wrinkly face.

Instead of replying, Mythili, Sita’s mother, pulled a see-through blue sheet up to her chin and turned her face away.

You can buy An Unlikely Goddess now from Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00FVSP82Q

About the author

Mohana is the modern mother, writer, wife. If you tell her something interesting, it's fair game for a blog post or her next novel. With eight e-books, two kids and a PhD, she's got a lot to say.