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In the Land of No Right Angles By Melissa J Wantuck  |
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 Released in paperback August 12, 2008, In the Land of No Right Angles is Daphne Beal’s first novel. It’s as much a travelogue as it is story.
Beal opens her story in Kathmandu, the capital city of Nepal nestled in a valley surrounded by the giants of the Himalayan mountain range. Her narrator, tall, red-headed Alex, a twenty-year-old college student studying abroad in Nepal for a year is studying photography and chose Nepal over cozy Western Europe for its ruggedness and simplicity.
The story begins after Alex has been in Nepal almost eight months and is embarking on a hiking trip into the mountains to a small village where she had spent a month of her time during the school semester. She is sent on an errand by a fellow American who is a professor. Will is 12 years Alex’s senior and they’ve developed a friendship mainly due to their shared interest in photography.
Contrary to Alex’s mid-western purity, Will is a philanderer. Without realizing it, Alex agrees to search out a young Nepali who captured Will’s eye when he met her the previous year. He asks Alex to carry a message to the girl that he has a job for in the city. The girl, Maya, is of a low caste Nepali family, and being a female, her future prospects are low. The job, though as a servant, is good opportunity for a girl of her situation. Other than marriage, she will have nothing and a last resort for girls like her is a life of disgrace.
When Alex meets Maya, she immediately forms a bond with the girl and begins to be protective of her, warning her of the type of man Will is. Maya insists she is aware of Will and won’t allow him to take advantage of her.
Maya and Alex are the classic example of East meets West. Despite the bond of friendship they develop, there is a gulf between them, separated by their different cultures. Alex struggles against Maya with her Western ideas of free choice and controlling your life. Maya is chained to her traditions that keep her mired at the bottom of society. She struggles over the future of her soul fearing that when she ran away from her parents, she condemned herself to a life of bad karma. At times she fights the fetters that bind her but always returns to back to them as her life takes her from Kathmandu to Bombay, India.
Beal’s writing translates Nepal and some of India, revealing both the beauty of the landscape and the difficulties of the lives of some of the people there. Readers don’t have to travel to those places to see it. Beal successfully paints the pictures for them. It’s in her development of Alex’s character that shows her weakness. There is very little to Alex. Her character is two dimensional, which is disappointing next to the fullness of the scenery and Will’s and Maya’s characters.
Alex’s purpose seems solely to be a messenger of the tale of Will and Maya with interspersions of Alex’s love life and photography career amidst interactions with Will and Maya, except that Beal intertwined Maya’s fate with Alex’s and the story culminates with Alex’s realization that her Western ideals of helping others only works when those who want to be helped.
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