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3.78 AVERAGE
3.78 AVERAGE
This book is heartbreaking and devastating but also an incredible and beautiful story.
Jeez, what a difficult book to read! Hardship after hardship after hardship follows Poornima and Savitha. The final sentence made it all worthwhile to read.
Full review here: https://www.shelfstalker.net/blog/girls-burn-brighter-shobha-rao
This is a love story, but it isn't romantic love. Rather, it is a story about the deep and fierce love of friendship—about the family we find in other people and how beyond all measures of human cruelty and across time and distance, that friendship can still ignite a fire that can create change.
Savitha and Poornima meet each other when Poornima's father hires Savitha to weave and help make saris, which are in high demand. In each other they find joy and hope. On the eve of Poornima's wedding—which was extremely difficult to arrange for her father—tragedy befalls the girls and Savitha flees, leaving them both to their own fates—two pieces of one thread unraveling.
The girls each experience brutality, learning that their lives matter little to many around them. But they each keep an internal flame alive, that spark of hope and passion that their friendship ignited and Poornima leaves behind everything to find her friend.
But reading about their struggles and how they react and overcome is a form of empowerment. These characters are not ones to take anything sitting down and they constantly move toward their goals.
What I love most about this book is that not only are the women the narrators, each taking a chapter in turn as the narrative progresses, what is central to the narrative is not dating, marriage, or the general search for or loss of men, but rather it is about their empowering friendship.
It seems to me that so often books about women or with women as the main characters are too often centered around men, sometimes so much so that the book ceases to be about the female character and is instead about how she is somehow not complete without some guy. Honestly, this is so boring to me and is the whole reason I avoid what is generally marketed as "women's fiction."
It is so refreshing to read a story that is so real and honest about the struggles of these women—so often they struggle silently with no one to help them except their own mental strength and perseverance. A book about women finding their way—their own way to what they want even though it is not an easy path, and where men are not the target.
Thank you to Flatiron Books for sending me an advance copy of this book.
This is a love story, but it isn't romantic love. Rather, it is a story about the deep and fierce love of friendship—about the family we find in other people and how beyond all measures of human cruelty and across time and distance, that friendship can still ignite a fire that can create change.
Savitha and Poornima meet each other when Poornima's father hires Savitha to weave and help make saris, which are in high demand. In each other they find joy and hope. On the eve of Poornima's wedding—which was extremely difficult to arrange for her father—tragedy befalls the girls and Savitha flees, leaving them both to their own fates—two pieces of one thread unraveling.
The girls each experience brutality, learning that their lives matter little to many around them. But they each keep an internal flame alive, that spark of hope and passion that their friendship ignited and Poornima leaves behind everything to find her friend.
But reading about their struggles and how they react and overcome is a form of empowerment. These characters are not ones to take anything sitting down and they constantly move toward their goals.
What I love most about this book is that not only are the women the narrators, each taking a chapter in turn as the narrative progresses, what is central to the narrative is not dating, marriage, or the general search for or loss of men, but rather it is about their empowering friendship.
It seems to me that so often books about women or with women as the main characters are too often centered around men, sometimes so much so that the book ceases to be about the female character and is instead about how she is somehow not complete without some guy. Honestly, this is so boring to me and is the whole reason I avoid what is generally marketed as "women's fiction."
It is so refreshing to read a story that is so real and honest about the struggles of these women—so often they struggle silently with no one to help them except their own mental strength and perseverance. A book about women finding their way—their own way to what they want even though it is not an easy path, and where men are not the target.
Thank you to Flatiron Books for sending me an advance copy of this book.
Casually devastating.
Also, while reading, I was reminded of a short story collection I’d read a while ago called “An Unrestored Woman,” only to finish this book and realize that both was written by the same author.
Also, while reading, I was reminded of a short story collection I’d read a while ago called “An Unrestored Woman,” only to finish this book and realize that both was written by the same author.
fast-paced
i could not put this book down, i read it in one day. a great debut novel, i enjoyed the back and forth between the two FMC POVs. i definitely went into this book blind, my copy did not have TWs page in the front. take care when reading
Content Warnings
Graphic: Domestic abuse, Rape, Sexual assault, Trafficking
Moderate: Alcoholism, Physical abuse, Alcohol
Minor: Confinement, Emotional abuse, Classism
A beautiful but extremely painful read; the things the two girls go through in this story...are hard to get through at parts. But a very human, believable, and powerful story.
Also, thanks to jury duty for giving me the time to read 100+ pages a day and finish this in three days.
Also, thanks to jury duty for giving me the time to read 100+ pages a day and finish this in three days.
Book 1 of my Goodreads challenge. My heart burst multiple times. ❤️
Girls Burn Brighter has a really interesting cadence to it; the prose winds back and forth, from present day to memories to dreams, sometimes within a paragraph. this, along with Rao's use of imagery and metaphor make her novel... dreamlike. i know that's an overused descriptor, but Girls Burn Brighter moves in a way that you normally experience in dreams. the sexual violence that occurs in the book, comes and goes without much "exciting" language, described in the same way that, say, a trip on a bus is.
there seems to be some frustration with the ending. it seems pretty clearly a "happy" ending, though you can choose for it to be tragic. i think i prefer the latter, as it makes the stories more powerful (in my own head).
there seems to be some frustration with the ending. it seems pretty clearly a "happy" ending, though you can choose for it to be tragic. i think i prefer the latter, as it makes the stories more powerful (in my own head).
DNF at 50%.
300 pages of watching the protagonist be brutally abused in each new situation she finds herself in. Judging by the other reviews, the ending isn't worth it.
300 pages of watching the protagonist be brutally abused in each new situation she finds herself in. Judging by the other reviews, the ending isn't worth it.