Review: In Hanuman's Hands: A Memoir

I recently had the opportunity to read In Hanuman's Hands: A Memoir by Cheeni Rao (HarperOne, ISBN978-0-06-073662-0). On the surface, it's just a story of an Indian-American overachiever who, aimless and rebellious, gets too deep into the dark world of drugs and barely fights his way out. But to call it just a memoir of addiction and recovery is to sell it short. In Hanuman's Hands is a vibrant trip through the history of he and his family, an epic of gods and demons, sex and death, magic and, yes, drugs. It's a story of salvation, and it has some of the best elements of literary fiction combined with the raw emotional power of experience.

As I'm normally a consumer of nonfiction and genre works who has tended to view both lit-fic and memoirs as boring or badly-written, my hopes weren't very high. As soon as I opened the book, however, my fears began to melt away. While it held my attention from the beginning, as soon as I hit the middle of the book, I couldn't stop reading. I stayed up half the night turning pages until I practically passed out. I read in the car and while eating, needing to know what happened next. From the author's note in the front of the book to the very last page, Rao has an incredible poetic voice that combines with an interesting storytelling style in which his story is woven back upon itself and interspersed with vignettes of modern myth and a family's faith, traditions and fate. The story slips between years and at times generations with the ease of thought and yet holds structure enough to make it easily followed. Rao doesn't just tell a story, he takes us on a vision quest into the bowels of his history, the images flowing in a vivid stream of consciousness. In Hanuman's Hands is powerful and satisfying, and when I'd turned the last page and the glow wore off, I felt myself inescapably jonesing for more.