A review by missbear
Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows by Balli Kaur Jaswal

funny lighthearted mysterious fast-paced
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.5

The weird thing about this book is that it's made up a bunch of opposites. I keep wanting to describe it as cute and lighthearted, which it is, but there are also sections of it that are quite dark, including a reference to a very violent suicide scene. This contrast is reflected throughout much of the book because this story is really two stories: one is a largely lighthearted and heartwarming story about a young woman figuring out her place in the world and a group of Punjabi widows who are reacquainting themselves with their sexualities through storytelling, and the other is a pretty dark mystery about misogyny and honor killings in a conservative community. As you can imagine, it's not as though these stories have nothing to do with each other in content - the reason these two stories are being told together makes perfect sense to me. The switches in tone, however, could be somewhat jarring for me, although I suspect that they're partly what makes this book popular: it's got the romance, it's got the mystery/thriller, it's got the contemporary social justice, it's got the own-voices look into a particular community, hell, it's even got the erotica!

Although I did learn a fair amount about the community of Southall and Sikh culture (my favorite being the explanation of how Sikh naming works - I can't believe I didn't know that Kaur and Singh are not family names), I think this book would have made a larger impact on me if it had picked one or two of the many things it was going for and delved into them more deeply. 
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