Location: 157 Winslow Way E., Bainbridge Island, WA 98110 | Map Hours: 10am-6pm daily | Phone: (206) 842-5332
“A stunning chronicle of an Indian woman’s coming-of-age. The story opens with Meena, a 14-year-old girl from Darbhanga, preparing for her wedding to Manmohan, a 21-year-old Nepalese student. . . . Many Indian and Nepali stories, songs, and myths anchor the narrative, and by the end, which circles back to the witch story, their meaning in relation to Meena becomes increasingly complex. This is electrifying.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review
“Is this a ghost story?” Meena asked the barber’s wife who told the tale. “I don’t want to hear scary stories one night before I marry.”
“Not all ghost stories are scary,” said the barber’s wife, laughing at Meena. “Besides, we have a long time before us, and stories are little baskets to carry time away in.”
Exquisitely written, a blend of ghost stories, myths, and song, The Woman Who Climbed Trees is a haunting, deeply felt multi-generational story that illuminates the transitional nature of women’s lives and the feeling of loss they experience, as they give up one home and family to become part of another.
When she marries a man from Nepal, Meena must leave behind her family and home in India and forge a new identity in a strange place. The Woman Who Climbed Trees follows her, the women who surround her, and the daughter she eventually raises, as they carefully navigate the uncertain tides of their diasporic lives.
Smriti Ravindra holds an MFA in creative writing from North Carolina State University. As a Fulbright scholar, she studied women’s oral storytelling in the Terai region of her native Nepal. Her fiction and journalism have been published in the US and in India. The Woman Who Climbed Trees is her first novel. She currently resides in Mumbai.
“Ravindra debuts with a stunning chronicle of an Indian woman’s coming-of-age. The story opens with Meena, a 14-year-old girl from Darbhanga, preparing for her wedding to Manmohan, a 21-year-old Nepalese student. . . . Many Indian and Nepali stories, songs, and myths anchor the narrative, and by the end, which circles back to the witch story, their meaning in relation to Meena becomes increasingly complex. This is electrifying.”
— Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Through a mix of ghost stories, myths, and songs, Ravindra examines the way that women are expected to reshape their lives for men and the pain that comes with leaving everything behind. When 14-year-old Meena marries a man from Nepal, she moves with him to Kathmandu and quickly grows to abhor him, despite their two children together. Meena’s discontent is tempered only by the solace she finds in the women around her and their stories of being uprooted.”
— Harper’s Bazaar
"The Woman Who Climbed Trees is a lyrical, furious triumph of a novel, mapping the marital journey of its protagonist, Meena, from girlhood to motherhood, from India to Nepal, from prosaic reality to magical madness. In the tradition of Salman Rushdie and Isabelle Allende, Smriti Ravindra braids epic lore and myth to a narrative of claustrophobic domesticity, earthly damage, and incandescent love." — Maria Dahvana Headley, New York Times-bestselling author of Beowulf: A New Translation and The Mere Wife
