****THE FIRST BOOK OF 2021**** Book 53 - Burnt Sugar by Avni Doshi

Reading date - January 2021

We.made.it.  We made it through the shittest year most of us have ever experienced.  I won't bang on too much about how shit 2020 was but as I sit here now in the second week of 2021 writing this, cases are apparently going through the roof and we are in lockdown 3.  The govt won't close the borders so whilst TK Maxx remains too dangerous for most of us, Z listers and "influencers" are able to fly away on "business" to Dubai.  What a load of old shite, they wouldn't know business if it smacked them in their coke filled noses.

My first book of 2021 is Burnt Sugar by Avni Doshi.  I obtained this book in December and I am sticking strictly to my rule of finishing books before I buy new ones.  I have done well at this..  *EDIT*: she did not do well on this as she has bought six more books since this date.

I had such high hopes for this book.  Hopes that vanished the more I read.  I cannot understand how this got nominated for a Man Booker, I just cannot.  The author is born in the US and now lives in Dubai.  What she has written is a book focused solely on how the higher class in India live.  She has not lived in India for long enough to know what it is like and her novel shows it.  I feel it was only nominated for the award because ethnic authors are very en vogue at the mo and they can put out any claptrap and it will be lauded.

The premise is a mother who has what can only be described as dementia and a daughter she embarrassed whilst she was growing up, trying to take care of her.  Only, that's not what this book is about at all.   The daughter seems a massive bitch who is angry with the mum for not giving her a life that she feels she deserves as she had some money.  To me, she is lashing out at the mum because her mum got all the chances to live a nice life and threw it away but the daughter was never given the chance.  The author keeps alluding to something bad the mum did to the daughter as a child but this is never revealed and I reckon nothing happened, bar the daughter not being given the life she wanted.  It's a load of random scenarios and pointless characters chucked together for no purpose.  Characters and situations are included for no reason, they add nothing to the story. It is also very difficult to like any of the characters in the book as they all lack depth.  It's not that I only get along with characters I like, no no, I like well written characters.  I know Bunny was an arsehole in The Secret History but I absolutely adored how he was written and I loved him.

The author doesn't really have much of an imagination as the mother is called Tara and the daughter is called Antara.  This has been done as a clever, faux poseur thing in that if you're smart enough to get it, the author is patronisingly telling you "well done".  The mother does not like the daughter, yet she called her Antara because it was an off-shoot of her own name? Bollocks.

Nobody in this book is likeable and it is all a bit too Emperor's New Clothes for me.  Some of the knowledge in it made me go "wow" because things that are normal to me have never been written down in books before but other than that it's not a good book.

The book is disturbing and I think the author has some severe daddy issues because she mentions sleeping with her dad and wondering if he would think he was sleeping with his wife.  For some bizarre reason, the girl in the book also then goes on to have an affair with her mum's ex boyfriend.

It's such a strange and pointless book which relates nothing back to the blurb which really draws you in.  It seems that the girl just dislikes the mother because she left the comfort of her well-off home and went to an ashram..

The spoilers begin here..

The book starts and tells you that Tara (the mum) has wealthy parents and goes to a good school, she bunks off school and goes drinking and smoking in the bars near her school.  One day, in her teens, she suddenly finds religion and decides that she wants to be a nun.  Her parents find her a husband who is agreeable to her and with the husband she has a baby (Antara).  She breaks up with the husband and joins the ashram.  Her husband remarries (pointless fact 1).  Her parents succeed in bringing her back from the ashram, they put the daughter into a private school where she is so damaged that she nearly ruptures a kidney holding in her piss (pointless fact 2).  They take the daughter out of this school and put her into another (pointless fact 3).  The mum bumbles around doing not much.  She finds a boyfriend and things are really good, until he randomly leaves (pointless fact 4).  Weaved into this is the story of Antara, who has found herself an NRI to marry.  Antara also has a best friend who has lesbian tendencies as they fingered each other in the toilets of a fancy club her grandparents are members of (pointless fact 4).

I can't help but think she has tried to write in the same style as Rupi Kaur but she fails because there's so much description in places and not enough where it is needed.  I mean once you've told me how smelly and hot the streets are, you don't have to tell me ten million times.

This book was a massive disappointment and it had a proper stupid, Hollywood ending which is very lazy.  Things go from being horrendously awful to being perfect literally in the space of minutes.  I hate when authors do that, you do your readers a massive disservice by insulting their intelligence expecting them to believe that something like this would happen.