Response to Jhumpa Lahiri's "Once in a Lifetime"

 This story follows the life of a young american girl who shares her and her family's home with her parent's friends from India. Throughout the story we get to see the young girl know the family and the cross cultural impact they have on each other. The story ends on a sad note with but it also ends on the same message of no regrets.

 I liked the story especially all the details and imagery! I thought this was done very well through out the story. I also liked the way it combined the two cultures, America and India, which helped shape the families and also provided some comedic moments. Being from Greek culture, my dad's Greek family is definitely different than my mom's American family so it was interesting reading this story and seeing some similarities. However, in a lot of cases with movies and books dealing with this subject they often embellish the foreign family and that was kind of done in this story but not too much. I'm not sure how much I really liked the ending, I know cancer and death are real things that happen everyday but I don't know how I felt about it in this story. I did like how the main character shows love for the young boy and is happy she got to meet this slightly different Indian family so it has that feeling of no regrets.

Overall, I liked a lot of the parts in the story and the details were fantastic but its not necessarily a story I would care to read again.