The Atlas of Reds and Blues

A Novel

By: Devi S. Laskar

Narrated by: Jeed Saddy

When a woman - known only as Mother - moves her family from Atlanta to its wealthy suburbs, she discovers that neither the times nor the people have changed since her childhood in a small Southern town. Despite the intervening decades, Mother is met with the same questions: Where are you from? No, where are you really from? The American-born daughter of Bengali immigrants, she finds that her answer - "Here" - is never enough.

Mother's simmering anger breaks through one morning when during a violent and unfounded police raid on her home, she finally refuses to be complacent. As she lies bleeding from a gunshot wound, her thoughts race from childhood games with her sister and visits to cousins in India, to her time in the newsroom before having her three daughters, to the early days of her relationship with a husband who now spends more time flying business class than at home.

The Atlas of Reds and Blues grapples with the complexities of the second-generation American experience, what it means to be a woman of color in the workplace, and a sister, a wife, and a mother to daughters in today's America.

Drawing inspiration from the author's own terrifying experience of a raid on her home, Devi S. Laskar's debut novel explores, in exquisite, lyrical prose, an alternate reality that might have been.

©2019 Devi S. Laskar (P)2019 HighBridge Company

Not ideal as an audiobook

While this novel was beautifully written and told a compelling story, it was hard to follow as a listener. I imagine it would be much easier to understand the back and forth between Mother’s distant memories, recent memories, and present circumstances in written format versus audio.