A review by emmkayt
Beautiful Thing: Inside the Secret World of Bombay's Dance Bars by Sonia Faleiro

4.0

Bleak but full of life, this work of narrative non-fiction centres on the life of Leela, a 19 year old bar dancer in Bombay, who gamely and determinedly insists on claiming whatever freedoms her life's constraints afford her. Faleiro spent five years immersed in the world of bar dancers, and does an excellent job conveying both their agency - dancing in a bar provided opportunities they were eager to seize - as well as the terrible impact of misogyny and caste (as Leela observes early in the book, she and all of her coworkers had either been raped or sold by a blood relative). The use of swathes of untranslated colloquial Hindi was a challenge, the pidgin was a bit odd, and I always have some discomfort with reconstructed dialogue, especially when the author wasn't present. But still, powerful.