A review by bluestarfish
Difficult Daughters by Manju Kapur

2.0

Virmati falls for a married man, Harish, so with that and her desire for education things get tricky at home in a middle class family in Amitsar in the 1940s. It's a time when Gandhi is asking people to get involved in non-violent civil disobedience and women are getting involved (and being arrested) in many new ways, and also a time when traditional roles for women are still the norm. And there is also plenty mention of the Partition. However the novel was at its best when describing the love story and the implications of a second wife in the family than when dealing with the "historic stuff". It would've been interesting to know more about Virmati's father and grandfather as men sympathetic to women's education in her life, but they seemed a little left out.