http://www.ghotimag.com/MasalaMoments.htm
Seasoned traveler, June, escapes the German winter for the sun and heat of Mumbai, India. A westerner in an unfamiliar landscape, her experiences and encounters are filled with missteps and successes, and what she is ultimately seeking is more significant than an escape from winter.

With sparse, carefully constructed prose, the novel unfolds as though it were a nesting doll. Moving with June from her flat to one airport after another, I was anxious for the narrative to begin, anxious to get to India. The sparse and fragmented language in the beginning places the reader firmly with June’s interior and initially I longed for longer sentences, richer detail. And then comes a quiet encounter with a stranger on a plane, beautifully rendered, and then India.

June is not an idealized traveler in a hyper-realized world. She carries with her: a guide book, her journal, and her preconceived understanding of a place and of a journey. At every turn and with every encounter and experience filled with fellow travelers, beggars, the Hindu God, Ganesh, the purpose of her journey shifts, is more fully realized.

Dorothee Lang’s resistance to creating an idealized narrator or an exotic India allows the people and the landscape in her novel to shine—every detail like a jewel in the sand, as in this passage: "--There, on the page, the day hasn’t even started, it is white and unmarked yet. June takes her pencil, and sketches the temple, the river, the nutshell boat. Her Shanti hut. Now for a line about the day. She closes her eyes, to search her memory. There it is. Something Halille has said. Or was it Nel?

You start from scratch every time you arrive."

With the inclusion of Lang’s own travel bio and with a section of savvy travel tips, India is calling.

-Donna Epler

From the short preview I felt that the author knows how to write and tell a good story.

This book is one that has many levels. The one that leads through it is the story of a young woman's journey to India. But after a while, I realized that there were deeper levels to it, not just an *interesting*story. Reading through the chapters, I was shown how important lessons can be learned from ordinary experiences. And how ordinary experiences in India are quite different from those in other places.

There is a wonderful economy to Dorothy Lang's writing. She does not waste words. For example, there was a journal that the main character, June, kept during the journey. It started out as blank pages, and it seemed at first as though she had nothing to write. But then she had a line to write, and as the journey progressed, a few more lines. And yet, by the end, those few lines revealed so much about June, about the journey, about India, and about life.

This story is an easy read but it is a journey in itself, filled with experiences and surprises that kept me thinking about this book long after I finished reading it.

Dorothee Lang’s "Masala Moments" sketches an India that reverberates through the eyes of the Western mind.

India in a teacup. Its flavour in pages. Its aroma in words. That is Masala Moments, the thoughts of an intrepid traveller through the maze of crowds, chaos and centrifugalness that is India. Yet the central character in the book, June, is not just the voice of the West but rather the echoes of the universal traveller- the search is not for India but the endless lure of the road. To roam the alleys of Hampi, the chowpatty beaches of Mumbai and the rustic languidness of the backwaters of Kerala for no reason apart from the fact that it “was time for it.”

From conversations with fellow travelers through restaurants and roadways, the reader is taken on a journey that offers more than India - it is essentially a glimpse into the sameness we share, Indian or German or Canadian or American, the ways are different but the paths cross.

- Serene Light Magazine, USA