![]() ![]() It's pretty confusing for Meena, whose loving Punjabi parents and friends stand in stark contrast to her idol, the mean girl Anita. This is Meera Syal's debut novel, and it's a simultaneously raucous, snarky, and loving coming of age tale.Adolescence is hard enough on us all, but being the only "brown girl" in an old isolated faded English coal mining town, where every girlchild is "chick" or "duck". ![]() ![]() It is a unique vision of a British childhood in the Seventies, a childhood caught between two cultures, each on the brink of change. Meena wheedles her way into Anita’s life, but the arrival of a baby brother, teenage hormones, impending entrance exams for the posh grammar school and a motorcycling rebel without a future threaten to turn Anita’s salad days sour.Īnita and Me paints a comic, poignant, compassionate and colourful portrait of village life in the era of flares, power cuts, glam rock, decimalisation and Ted Heath. ![]() Meena wants fishfingers and chips, not chapati and dhal she wants an English Christmas, not the usual interminable Punjabi festivities – but more than anything, she wants to roam the backyards of working-class Tollington with feisty Anita Rutter and her gang.īlonde, cool, aloof, outrageous and sassy, Anita is everything Meena thinks she wants to be. But, as the daughter of the only Punjabi family in the mining village of Tollington, her struggle for independence is different from most. Nine-year-old Meena can’t wait to grow up and break free from her parents. ![]()
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