Kardamom Kisses is the story of Choti (aka Drupa) and Badi (Disha), two sisters whose parents -- Kedar from Punjab and Mangala from Kerala -- are separated. The book is divided into three parts; Part I deals with the sisters' lives in Kerala, where the young girls stay with Mangala in her ancestral home in Ollur. Also present are Mangala's mother and two brothers, and several scheming relatives.

The first paragraph of this book reads:

It was an unidentified summer when Amma packed her bags, air-colored dreams and hurtled down here with us like coconuts _thup-thup_ from a tree. The heat simmered on, turning into a crisp the plantain leaves we ate on, parching throats, skinned knees and even the nectar inside the earth-bound dangle of the bulbous bambloos lime, bleaching pillows and dreams alike until sunshine by the bucket had blinded us to other seasons.

Kardamom Kisses is stuffed with tangled similes and metaphors which crowd each other -- and the reader.

Fanning brow with the veshti's gilt edge that forced flies to reverse into a skittish arabesque and forecasting, "The sun will froth over, if you ask me", she wore on her placid round face the certainty of consensus while making small talk with self. (Page 4)

'Even the night that sucked it down like a sweet, the sun in the sky with its million vermillion rays, was only the pitch black round of a mouth saying "aah".' (Page 4)

All this in the first two pages.

It almost seems as though Antony has striven to frame every action and every idea in elaborately coy language. Choti doesn't say no; rather, she 'showcases negation.' She doesn't want a dog, but 'craves canine company.' A balding head 'necessitates a cross-cranium combing technique.' A doctor assumes a 'medical expression' when tending to a patient.

Two young siblings, their mother, and a set of dysfunctional relatives, all in small-town Kerala -- comparisons with The God of Small Things are inevitable, and perhaps Antony resorted to ornate prose as a means of combating Roy's success with Ayemenem. But the story in Kardamom Kisses is very nearly buried under such overdone writing; this reviewer found Part I a frustrating read.

Part II (a third into the book) sees the setting shift from Kerala to the north. The siblings' father, Kedar, whisks them away to Delhi, where he lives with his second wife. Drupa and Disha must adapt to a new (step) mother, a new set of Punjabi relatives, and to life in Delhi.

Antony comes into her own when she details the clash between North and South, describing, with a perceptive eye, the sisters' reaction to the unfamiliar environment. The children have to change not just from Malayalam to Hindi but from coconut to mustard oil, and learn to adapt to 'black salt and coriander garnish, sweet instead of salty buttermilk'. Part III of the book, which looks at the dissolution of Kedar and Mangala's romance in the face of their cultural incompatibility, is again knowledgeably and acutely done. Mangala calls Rajma (kidney beans) Rajamma, and the dish inevitably acquires a flavor of the south along with its new name, even as her mother-in-law trains her to serve (unpurified) tap water to guests but add ginger to the important marriage-brokering aunt's tea.

Such sections of the book, wherein Antony's powers of observation and keen sense of the ridiculous are on display, are intensely readable. This reviewer wished the author had concentrated on reporting the minutiae of the North-South interface rather than create melodramatic events (suicide, abortion, near-incest, extra-marital affairs and a kidnapping, to name a few) in the lives of her characters in order to propel the story along.

Instances of awkward -- and sometime plain wrong -- grammar and punctuation make Kardamom Kisses an even bumpier read. Commas are stingily distributed (even though the author has a penchant for convoluted sentences), and articles are frequently missing. Several similes are awkwardly structured; at one point, the author writes that the 'girls picked out raisins and blackened bits of coconut from the payasam like a headful of lice.' (Page 6)

A stricter editor would have pared down the overwriting, played to Antony's strengths, proofread the manuscript with more attention -- and turned Kardamom Kisses into a keeper. Antony certainly has an acute eye for detail and a lively way with words; sometimes, her language even dazzles. In its present form, however, Kardamom Kisses is more miss than hit.

Book Description: In Kardamom Kisses, members of a dysfunctional family flail along life's funny path, hoping for salvation, or at least some action. The north and south of India clash in a celebration of contrasts as secrets come tumbling out, familial ties are refurbished and love is not quite what it seems.

There is Punjab and there is Kerala, brought startlingly alive, and when Kedar weds Mangala, little does he bargain for whole cities and families to disdain each other. Pressured and soon celibate by compulsion, he turns to other pursuits, notably a second wife, while she copes with the results of hasty breeding. The children born to them travel into a future that alarmingly begins to resemble their roots and realize that in life magic is at a premium.

Sparkling wit savages societal snapshots as Shinie Antony takes the nice and the nasty to transform her debut novel into a merry carousel of touching moments. Here is a novel that clicks its tongue, asking the Great Indian Family to get moving.