"An Indian-American serio-comic and magical realist epic love story about the perils of ambition, tracing the mysterious alchemy of its characters' transformation from high school in an Atlanta suburb through young adulthood in the Bay Area"--

Starting with the positive, all of us thought the idea of stealing someone's gold as a magically real metaphor for taking their ambition was a great mythology to base the story on. Sathian does just a terrific job weaving the themes of immigration and ambition through the concept of gold digging throughout the book, from the history of gold speculation moving from Georgia to California to the tragic history of the Bombayan gold digger. That said, a lot of the power of the novel is rooted in whether you feel something for Neil and Anita as they hustle and struggle under the pressure to achieve in high school. Some of us at NUBClub knew people (or were people) in that situation and we thus could read a lot into and empathize greatly with their struggles. Others felt that the novel didn't go far enough to establish what the stresses on the kids were or why we should care. The plot was a bit rough for everyone. While the early part of the novel does a good job establishing Neil getting drawn into the gold drinking cabal and using his classmates for his fix, the second half of the novel ends with a comedic heist scene at a wedding convention that just defies belief, and the plot takes a turn at the end to a confusing magically real moment and then a suddenly happy resolved ending. We understood that the point of Sathian's book is that less ambitious lives are still happy and valuable ones, but the way the books ties up just felt too pat. There was a lot to like in Gold Diggers, from the core conceit to the depiction of the striving of immigrant families to the deep questions of what Indian-American identity means. But if you don't find the stresses of high-achieving teenagers moving, this book will not work for you.