Now You See Us: A Novel

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It is based on events of the 1989 Central Park jogger case and explores the lives and families of the five Black and Latino male suspects who were falsely accused then prosecuted on charges related to the rape and assault of a white woman in Central Park, New York City. It has a mystery going through it which was very attention grabbing however the lives of these poor domestics were unbelievably difficult, made worse by the Singapore women of the house. Cora, a seasoned worker, struggles with a kind, well-meaning employer, whose manipulative daughter is a source of trouble. Balli Kaur Jaswal's latest novel is The Unlikely Adventures of the Shergill Sisters (Harper Collins/William Morrow).The book jacket describes this novel as Crazy Rich Asians meets The Help, and while I haven’t read the former, I’d say this book is definitely less problematic than The Help - so maybe a less problematic version of The Help blended with Big Little Lies. There are only about 300 pages although the audiobook itself was a little over 11 hours, but it goes really quickly, and I didn’t want to put it down. Each month, we gather up the reviews of our virtual book club members so anyone else looking for their next great read has a collection of recommendations.

This book will definitely find it's audience because the author has a solid reputation in the commercial market. The premise of blowing the doors off the mistreatment of Filipino maids employed by exploitative Singaporean Ma'ams is very appealing. There were parts that made me laugh and scenes that filled me with indignance on behalf of the characters. Born in Singapore and raised in Japan, Russia and the Philippines, she studied creative writing in the US and the UK. Her previous novels include Inheritance, which won the Sydney Morning Herald’s Best Young Australian Novelist Award, and Sugarbread, a finalist for the Epigram Books Fiction Prize and the Singapore Literature Prize.

It's also the social and class divide, the classism and elitism and casual racism, the nation's reliance on a foreign workforce, our treatment and perception of these migrant workers, and a whole plethora of issues that tend to get swept beneath Singapore's glitz and glamour. In a positive review of the miniseries, Jen Chaney from Vulture wrote that, " When They See Us, Ava DuVernay's sensitively wrought Netflix miniseries about what happened to those boys, strips away the dehumanizing tendency to bunch them together and instead shows what each of them dealt with individually when they were coerced into giving false confessions, forced to do time for a crime they did not commit, and, eventually, exonerated when their convictions were vacated in 2002.