Sex and Samosas

Last Sunday afternoon, Sachiko Okuda took me to Jasmine Aziz's book launch. It was held in the East India Company, an elegant and excellent Indian restaurant, attended by about 100 of Jasmine's friends and family members. Sachiko and Jasmine were two of the participants at the Writers' Workshop in Pembroke a few months ago. Here they are with me at the book launch.
Now I've read the book, Sex and Samosas, from cover to cover, which beats reading excerpts on Jasmine's blog. I think it is a very good, well written book. It describes a young woman's journey from miserable overweight and low self-esteem to self-confident athletic fitness, and a most appropriate happy ending. It begins and ends with two sex parties, parties where women can buy sexy underwear, perfumed and flavoured oils and unguents, lubricants and sex toys, learn something about their own bodies, and have a lot of fun while getting a little loosened up by liquor. There are some raunchy, lurid sex scenes but it's worth reading for other reasons as well. It provides a poignant victim's perspective of ways that school girls can be cruel to a classmate whose skin pigment, hair, dress, and diet differ from the mainstream in that school. This is not emphasized but sketched lightly in the background. Also sketched are accounts of some ways in which cohesive Indian extended families are cohering, yet mixing and blending into the multicultural mosaic that makes Canada such a wonderful, exciting country to live in and belong to. In many places, including several of the raunchiest sex scenes it's laugh-out-loud funny. Good descriptions of the unique ecstasy of sexual pleasures are very rare in literature and fiction. This book contains one of the best descriptions of what an orgasm feels like, that I've ever read. I hope all those who read my blog will read Sex and Samosas too, and recommend it to all their friends. You can get a copy at amazon.com
(The photo at the top of this post was taken at the annual Ottawa Book and Craft Fair a few weeks later. I wanted to put it at the end of this post but the software program put it at the top and I'm not savvy enough to know how to shift it).