SOURCE: Goodrich, Chris. “A Wide-Eyed View of America, Where All Has Been Made Easy.” Los Angeles Times (14 January 1994): E4.

In the following review, Goodrich praises An American Brat, calling the work “a funny and memorable novel.”

It's 1978 in Pakistan and 16-year-old Feroza Ginwalla, the heroine of this novel [An American Brat], is beginning to worry her relatively liberal, upper-middle-class Parsee parents.

She won't answer the phone; she tells her mother to dress more conservatively; she sulks, she slams doors, she prefers the company of her old-fashioned grandmother; she seems to sympathize with fundamentalist religious thinking.

What to do? “I think Feroza must get away,” says Zareen, the girl's mother, to her husband, Cyrus. “Travel will broaden her outlook, get this puritanical rubbish out of her head.”

And indeed it does—although to a disastrous degree, from Zareen and Cyrus' point of view, for Feroza's three-month sabbatical with her...