Guyanese-American writer Nanda Reddy takes a big swing and makes a major emotional impact with her no-holds-barred debut novel, A Girl Within a Girl Within a Girl. A harrowing tale of sacrifice, survival and identity, Reddy presents an unvarnished look at how the American Dream morphs into a nightmare for one young girl.
In the blink of an eye, the entire course of your life can change. This is a lesson Maya has learned many times over, yet she’s still knocked sideways when a letter addressed to Sunny, a name she has not used in years, arrives from a sister no one in her life—including her husband and two sons—knows she has. Without warning, the life and identity Maya has fought so hard to construct is at risk. Maya knows the only option to avoid losing everything once again is to finally come clean about her past, but before she can do that, she will first need to face and make peace with the many identities she’s left behind along the way.
And so the journey begins, with Reddy transporting readers from Maya’s kitchen in Atlanta, Georgia, back to the dusty streets of Guyana where she grew up as a girl named Sunny. We witness a crooked twist of fate that sends 12-year-old Sunny to live with strangers in Florida, with the expectation that she will one day be able to pay off her passage and sponsor the rest of her family to join her in the U.S. But the man who arranged her passage hasn’t been honest with Sunny or her hosts, and, facing incredible hardship, Sunny commits to transforming herself into a person who can endure the traumas that otherwise threaten to consume her.
A Girl Within a Girl Within a Girl is unflinchingly honest in its depiction of child trafficking and the plight of illegal immigrants in the United States. The sobering narrative makes for painful reading, but Sunny’s strength and determination to survive will buoy readers, and the dual timeline structure also offers necessary reprieves. Reddy’s deeply affecting novel is not easily forgotten and will appeal to fans of writers such as Khaled Hosseini and Charmaine Wilkerson.
