Girls Burn Brighter
by Shobha Rao
4/5 stars
⭐⭐⭐⭐
A haunting debut novel set in India and America, about an enduring friendship between two girls who are driven apart but never stop trying to find one another again.
When Poornima first meets Savitha, she realizes that Poornima is her best friend for life and maybe more. Poornima's father hires Savitha to work one of their sari looms, and the two girls are quickly drawn to one another. Both girls end up subjected to devastating cruelty, and Poornima is determined to find her friend again. Her journey takes her into the darkest corners of India's underworld, and across the globe to an apartment complex in Seattle. Alternating between the girls’ perspectives as they face innumerable obstacles, these two heroines who never lose hope.
This was a truly haunting book, very well written, and really gives the reader a glimpse into a culture that is not familiar to the western reader. You really feel for Poornima and Savitha in so many situations, and it is shocking that people are still treated in this way.
The indignities suffered by the young women and the way they are treated is nearly incomprehensible to someone like myself, a middle class western white woman, with self-determination. My heart broke about 50 times reading this book.
It was very well written, but I was reading a paper copy, and there were many words I had to Google. It might have been a nice idea to include an index of terms for the mainstream reader. I know what a sari is of course, but not a charka (Indian spinning wheel) or a Pallu (the long, loose, end piece of the sari). There were numerous other terms such as these I was unfamiliar with.
Overall a great book, highly recommended
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