{"id":379,"date":"2024-09-16T11:16:00","date_gmt":"2024-09-16T11:16:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/?p=379"},"modified":"2024-09-16T11:16:00","modified_gmt":"2024-09-16T11:16:00","slug":"book-review-deep-fried-by-mark-doyon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/?p=379","title":{"rendered":"Book Review: Deep Fried by Mark Doyon"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Deep Fried<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

by Mark Doyon<\/p>\n

Genre:<\/strong> Literary Fiction<\/p>\n

ISBN: <\/strong>9798985035360<\/p>\n

Print Length:<\/strong> 252 pages<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Reviewed by Frankie Martinez<\/em><\/p>\n

A cheery, immigrant businessman puts all his hopes into an atypical food truck in this clever, character-rich novel.<\/strong><\/h2>\n

When a new vendor called \u201cBollywood Eggrolls\u201d appears at the food truck park just outside the Broadnax County Courthouse, it attracts a lot of curiosity. Some question its cuisine\u2014Asian fusion featuring Chinese eggrolls filled with Indian curry. Others wonder about the unfamiliar Bollywood stars painted on the side of the truck, among them Katrina Kaif of \u201cJab Tok Hai Jaan\u201d fame.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Its proprietor, the happy-go-lucky Arjun Chatterjee, doesn\u2019t mind answering any inquiries from prospective customers. An immigrant from Delhi raised in Tucson, Arizona, Arjun narrowly avoided becoming the manager at his father\u2019s Foot Locker by escaping to Virginia with his Amma\u2019s curry recipe and a dream: \u201cIn his mind, he had always been leaving for some faraway place where he would shed the shackles of his birth and clothe himself anew in the threads of possibility. He would meet a beautiful girl and settle down in a shining Western city. He would succeed in business. It was intoxicating.\u201d<\/em><\/strong>\u00a0<\/p>\n

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Optimism seems to be Arjun\u2019s guiding principle for reaching his goals until he receives a strange, anonymous note from someone in the food truck park. While Arjun starts to question himself for what feels like the first time ever, he also wonders who of the food truck park\u2019s own little network of dreamers could have sent him the message.\u00a0<\/p>\n

With twists both humorous and heartbreaking, Deep Fried<\/em> is a touching story about pursuing freedom in a world that wants to knock you down. Doyon provides multiple playful perspectives on this idea with an eclectic cast of characters: This includes Candy, a Bollywood Eggrolls regular and an unlucky-in-love office worker struggling to find peace in her personal life; Antwaan, an aspiring rapper building street cred by committing petty crimes in order to reject any privileges his parents\u2019 wealth affords him; and Pidgey, the pigeon that hangs out with Arjun in the Bollywood Eggrolls truck and wonders on the whereabouts of the pigeons that came before him.\u00a0<\/p>\n

While characters are satisfyingly connected by their desire for freedom as well as their differing ideas about it, the novel\u2019s platitudes about American liberty may lean a bit too heavily on the American Constitution and Founding Fathers. Doyon manages to keep things fresh by rendering characters exquisitely\u2014detailed backstories, alarming conflict, charming, and just-weird-enough dialogue\u2014and breathing new life into some of the older ideas through the core of his characters. I especially liked Candy\u2019s more wry take on the matter: \u201cYou thought America was a big melting pot of people and cultures and cuisines. And it is. But everybody wants to be a cowboy. They want to be cowboys because cowboys are free. Cowboys do whatever they like.\u201d\u00a0<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Deep Fried<\/em> feels like modern-day folklore\u2014lively, odd, and full of familiar, old-world proverbs that get you through the day.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

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Thank you for reading Frankie Martinez\u2019s book review of Deep Fried <\/em>by Mark Doyon! If you liked what you read, please spend some more time with us at the links below.<\/p>\n

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The post Book Review: Deep Fried by Mark Doyon<\/a> appeared first on Independent Book Review<\/a>.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Deep Fried by Mark Doyon Genre: Literary Fiction ISBN: 9798985035360 Print Length: 252 pages Buy from Amazon Buy from Bookshop Reviewed by Frankie Martinez A cheery, immigrant businessman puts all his hopes into an atypical food truck in this clever, character-rich novel. When a new vendor called \u201cBollywood Eggrolls\u201d appears at the food truck park […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":380,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-379","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-bookreviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/379"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=379"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/379\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/380"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=379"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=379"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=379"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}