The Village by the Sea

The family in Village By the Sea is deeply poor in India. The father, like the father in Distance Between Us, mentally and emotionally retreats from the family through alcoholism. The mother mentally and emotionally retreats from the family through illness. Like Distance Between Us, the children are left to fend for themselves for the most part, with some taking on work and some caring for the other children. Village By the Sea has a child audience, so the pain of poverty is often glossed over, and the story is fiction so the author is able to bring about a magical happy ending. I think these things weakened the story for me as a reader. I was nevertheless taken with the details of life in a small poor village in India.