Reviews with content warning for Mental illness - Burnt Sugar

In Burnt Sugar, Avni Doshi explores how we build and maintain relationships as Antara supports her mother Tara as memory slips away and dementia takes hold.

For me, Burnt Sugar was a deeply unsettling read. It starts as a conventional story of a daughter dealing with the onset of Alzheimer’s in a parent. It includes the flashbacks you’d expect in that kind of narrative. But as mother Tara loses her memories and Antara explores her own, the boundaries between past and present, mother and daughter, real and imagined become increasingly blurry and we find ourselves uncertain of what we can trust.

If you’ve been close to someone as dementia has progressed, this book may evoke familiar feelings about the fickleness of memory. When suddenly the person who you’ve shared a memory with no longer remembers it or does so in a completely mangled fashion, you start to question the solidity of what you thought was an indisputable fact. If our relationships are built through shared experiences, what’s left when the memories start to break down, fall apart, or become unrecognizable? What is lost and what is revealed?

Having had a parent with dementia, I recognized that feeling of having a parent who is there but not there. That feeling of being adrift, of being unsure of the future but also increasingly insecure in the past. When their grasp on reality slips, the reverberations shake yours as well. The responsibilities of care-giving hone down our feelings to their very roots. As the person you knew ceases to exist, you’re forced to face what you know and how you feel and it haunts every moment of your day. Doshi has captured the overwhelming, claustrophobic burden of care and memory in a story I won’t soon forget.

I can definitely understand why Burnt Sugar was on the Booker Prize short list. It’s a powerful exploration of what happens when the carer roles switch in a parent-child relationship. It’s the kind of book that makes you want to talk to someone about it when you finish.

Although it was nominated for The Booker Prize last summer it’s just now being released in North America (this coming Tuesday). Many thanks to Abrams Books and NetGalley for this eARC in exchange for an honest review.

Content Warnings

penelopereads's review against another edition

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challenging dark medium-paced

Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? N/A
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

Can’t make up my mind about this book. It’s uh... transgressive. I was filled with a sense of dread reading it. It’s grimy.
The storytelling is good though and you name it - the author went there. The writing also stopped me in my tracks a few times.
Still, I don’t really know what to think. Is it really bad or really good? Someone please tell me where I should land.

Content Warnings

hannahmayreads's review against another edition

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challenging dark funny sad medium-paced

Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

"I am grieving but it is too early to burn the body."

This is the third book (almost in a row) that I've read recently that features dementia, with the repercussions of the loss forming a central point in the novel. Coincidence or not, and despite each book being very different, it is a thread that will always bind them together in my mind. They (The Last Wave and Ghosts) are all such different stories told by very different writers but the suspended grief of mourning someone who remains only bodily runs through each of them.

The fracturing of her mother's memory sends Antara searching through her own memory. The trauma, the toxicity and the secrets of her past and present are drawn to the forefront of her mind. It is as if her mother's shifting conception of reality is forcing her to reconsider the validity of her own memories. Who is she and did she get here? Are these questions she can even answer? As her mother's memory slips further Antara's own daughter comes into the world, and the mother-daughter relationship shifts again.

"Maybe we would have been better if I had never been designated as her undoing. How do I stop myself from making the same mistake? How do I protect this little girl from the same burden? Maybe that's impossible. Maybe this is wishful thinking."

The cover quote for this book is absolutely spot-on: taut, unsettling, ferocious (Fatima Bhutto in case you were wondering).

"I will never be free of her. She's in my marrow and I'll never be immune."

Content Warnings

daisymaytwizell's review against another edition

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challenging emotional reflective fast-paced

Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

You meet more Taras and Antaras than I can count over the course of this novel, and Doshi never once falters in her weaving of them.

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