The Unpronounceable by Balli Kaur Jaswal
Balli Kaur Jaswal’s The Unpronounceables begins with something deceptively small: a name. Navkiranjhot Ahloowalia, known as Navy, is accustomed to watching teachers hesitate, mispronounce and occasionally give up altogether. The joke is funny because Jaswal makes it funny, but the discomfort beneath it is real. A name carries family, language and history, and every mangling becomes another reminder that Navy is visible as different while frequently feeling unseen as herself.
That contradiction drives this warm and perceptive coming-of-age novel. Navy is fifteen, Australian-born and growing up within a Punjabi family whose love arrives bundled with expectation. Her parents want security for her, and security means gaining entry to a selective STEM school and pursuing the sort of career that can withstand uncertainty. Navy has largely accepted the plan. Then she discovers art history, and the future mapped out for her begins to feel less like opportunity and more like confinement.
Jaswal is particularly good at capturing the strange exhaustion of being a high-achieving teenager whose choices have already become communal property. Navy’s parents are not villains. Their ambitions emerge from experience, anxiety and a desire to give their daughter possibilities they value deeply. That makes Navy’s resistance harder. Saying no to people who have sacrificed for you can feel less like independence than betrayal.
The novel extends that pressure into Navy’s friendships. She and her two closest friends identify themselves through their shared experience as girls whose names are routinely mispronounced and whose cultural backgrounds mark them out at school. Jaswal finds humour in this solidarity but also allows it to fracture. Friendship becomes another place where identity is negotiated, where loyalty and resentment can exist side by side, and where being misunderstood by the people who should understand you best can hurt most.
Art gives the novel its most interesting counterpoint. As Navy encounters artists and paintings, she begins to develop a language for looking, interpretation and individuality. Her attraction to art history is therefore not an arbitrary rebellion against science. It changes how she understands herself. Jaswal uses that awakening effectively, showing intellectual curiosity as something capable of disrupting an identity built largely around other people’s expectations.
There is romance too, through Rishal, who enters Navy’s life as a mentor for the entrance exam and gradually complicates matters further. Happily, the relationship never overwhelms the larger story. Navy’s central struggle concerns authorship of her own future.
Jaswal’s humour keeps the novel buoyant, particularly when describing school culture, parental comparisons and the recurring indignities surrounding names. Occasionally, conflicts resolve with a tidiness that slightly softens the messiness the novel otherwise captures so well, and some readers may want more complexity around Navy’s tendency to define school life through cultural divisions. Yet the book’s generosity towards its characters is one of its strengths.
The Unpronounceables succeeds because it treats belonging as an active process, not a destination. Navy does not have to choose between being Australian and Punjabi, between family and independence, or between gratitude and ambition. She has to learn how to make room for all of them while deciding which voice gets the final say. For younger readers negotiating similar pressures, that recognition may be as important as hearing their name pronounced correctly.
Reviewers: Chris Reed
Allen & Unwin
