SOURCE: "A Madcap Search for Bio-Mom," in The New York Times, June 24, 1997, p. C18.

In the following review, Kakutani complains that Mukherjee's Leave It to Me is "a book in which her favorite themes have warped into didactic obsessions, and her stylistic idiosyncrasies have slipped perilously close to mannerism."

Leave It to Me, Bharati Mukherjee's latest novel, has all her trademark preoccupations: exiles, émigrés and outsiders tirelessly reinventing themselves, as they shed old lives, old lovers, old selves; and an America reeling from violence and nonstop change, a country in which freedom has translated into rootlessness, possibility into dislocation. It has a heroine who's addicted to change, a supporting cast of eccentrics and a wildly manic plot.

The problem is Leave It to Me reads less like a Bharati Mukherjee novel than a parody of a Bharati Mukherjee novel. It's a book in which her favorite themes...