A tween's arrest throws his Indian American family into disarray.The latest novel from Gowda starts as it means to go on, with this sentence: "While twelve-year-old Ajay sat trembling in a jail cell, his parents were enjoying themselves at a dinner party." What follows is a long exploration of racism, classism, and ableism, with the contrasts between the privileged and the less so heightened to a fever pitch. Ajay is a shy boy, the son of Indian immigrants in California, likely autistic with an abiding interest in robots and drones. His brutal arrest, at the hands of an overzealous cop, comes after he flies his prized drone near John Wayne Airport in Orange County. His arrest roils his family: his parents, Priya and Ashok, and his sisters, social-justice-focused Deepa and high school athlete Maya, who are both keeping secrets from their parents. Priya and Ashok live by their own code: "work hard, don't make waves, keep placing one foot in front of the other on each new rung that appeared before them"; they have trouble squaring that with the possibility that Ajay has been racially profiled. Deepa disdains them for not bothering "to look back at who was left behind." The novel follows the aftermath of the arrest, as Priya and Ashok enlist a lawyer recommended by a wealthy friend; said friend later is accused of casteism at his company. Gowda's narration is fast-paced, and she is gifted at building suspense, but the prose sometimes falls flat and the dialogue too often echoes movie cliches. The book is bound to draw comparisons to Celeste Ng's Little Fires Everywhere (2017), but it has more in common with ​​Paul Haggis' heavy-handed 2004 film, Crash.This well-intentioned effort just doesn't land.

Gowda’s scorching latest (after The Shape of Family) chronicles an Indian American family’s complex and varied attitudes toward class and racial divides in Southern California. Ashok and Priya Shah can’t quite afford affluent Pacific Hills, Calif., but they move there anyway, determined to raise their status after their humble beginnings as immigrants in middle-class Irvine. Their middle child, Maya, readily assimilates with her wealthy classmates at the new school, but their older daughter, Deepa, refuses to benefit from the social injustice of a segregated school system and insists on staying at her overcrowded old school with her close friend Paco, whose mother is undocumented. Deepa and her parents continually clash, especially after the Shahs’ 12-year-old son, Ajay, flies his homemade drone over the airport, accidentally crashes it into the ground, and is beaten by the police and arrested as a terrorism suspect. Deepa wishes her parents would acknowledge that Ajay is a victim of the systemic racism they expected to be protected from by moving to a gated community, but they’re more worried about becoming subjects of controversy as his continued jailing fuels a media storm. Gowda presents each family member’s viewpoint thoroughly, as well as the perspectives of the cop who leads the investigation into Ajay and another who believes he should be released. Her light touch is refreshing and graced with nuance, allowing her to find the truth in a wide range of perspectives. Readers won’t want to put this down. Agent: Ayesha Pande, Ayesha Pande Literary. (Mar.)