Girls Burn Brighter is a thick flavorful soup of a novel full of the spices of India. It is also a heart wrenching tale of two poor young Indian women’s hopes, dreams and grim realities.

Young Poornima is the oldest of two sisters with a younger brother when her mother dies from cancer. Needing someone to run the other sari fabric loom, her father hires Savitha, another young woman from an even poorer family. Poornima and Savitha become best friends. When tradition and violence divides them onto separate life paths, the novel alternates their stories.

Growing up poor is harsh anywhere, but in India in 2001, female baby’s names aren’t even recorded in the village records. Within this novel, females are useless except for three things: housekeeping, sex and babies. It is an unrelentingly dark viewpoint that permeates this book. However, parts of the book show an excitement for the physical details of life: the smells, sounds and colors of India.

Girls Burn Brighter had some great pre-release reviews so I picked it up. I didn’t even know the basic plot when I began reading this book and I believe that is best. It is highly recommended literary women’s fiction. While reading its heroines’ horrifying stories, it does make your relatively insignificant problems seem petty at best. I just pray that this story is not based in any way based on fact.

Be aware that this novel has some adult content and themes and so should be read only by adults.

Thanks to the publisher, Flatiron, and NetGalley for an advanced copy.

I have attempted and failed to finish all the books I have read so far this year that have dealt with India, and I do not believe that this is any fault of the author's. India is so large and so diverse and so rarely talked about in America that it is hard to imagine the settings, difficult to put myself in the shoes of the characters. It is so far from my lived experience that it makes the story difficult to follow.

The writing is rich and compelling though, so if you are interested in the political and social intricacies of India and the effects of those systems on the women within, give this book a try.

I have been seeing Girls Burn Brighter by Shobha Rao popping up everywhere on Instagram and have been hearing raving reviews about it. It’s a powerful novel about two girls, Poornima and Savitha, who form a strong friendship. When a tragic circumstance stance happens, the girls are pulled apart. Poornima ends up on a long journey trying to find Savitha. Overall, I thought this book was okay. The beginning of the book piqued my interest and loved learning how they became friends. The author’s writing is amazing with the alternating perspectives from each main character. The characters are definitely well-developed as well. However, I had a very difficult time reading this book due to the extreme graphic content of rape, abuse, and human trafficking. When I initially read the premise, I knew it was going to be a heartbreaking story, but the warning without the extreme graphic content threw me off completely. The amount of extreme suffering and trauma each of the character goes through is so much that it made me feel emotionally drained by the end of the novel. I would only recommend this novel if you could read brutally heartbreaking novels. If I knew how graphic this would have been before I had a chance to read this, I would have skipped it all together. Girls Burn Brighter releases on Tuesday 3/6/18.

I didn't read an in-depth summary of this book before committing to read, and was a bit caught off guard by how heartbreaking the story was. That said, it is beautifully written; I was crying within the first few pages, and the emotional wave carried me through the entire novel.

Girls Burn Brighter broke my heart in so many ways but I absolutely loved this book. This is the story of Poornima and Savitha, poor girls in India who find each other and develop a friendship that transcends many obstacles and years of separation. These friends are torn apart by a cruel act and we follow them as their lives take different paths and they fight to find their way back to each other. The oppression these girls face, the abuse, and the trafficking are all tough to read but unfortunately a reality for so many girls today. The girls fight to keep their light burning inside them through these obstacles and never letting the darkness win. This was a 5 star read for me until the end. The ending was really lacking for me, I needed more closure. Thank you @flatiron_books for an advance reader in exchange for my honest review. This book will be out March 6, this is one to put on your TBR's!

My apologies, but I am not in a place where I can read such a wrenchingly sad book. I got through the first 30% but could not finish. It is beautiful writing and such an important story, but I could not take the sadness right now.

If you had to read Kamala Markandaya for school or gravitate towards Khaled Hosseini or the like, you'll enjoy Shobha Rao's Girls Burn Brighter. Young girls, Savitha and Poornima, have grown up in a village in India where money was scarce and dowries were high. These two, coming from different families, are skilled with a loom and earn a fair amount of money making saris. However when a terrible incident separates these two and Savitha escapes, she and Poornima's paths sadly head in two different directions. Both of these young women are forced to make bold choices, stand up for themselves, and get tested to see if the inner light in them will be extinguished or if they can move forward and live lives they deserve. While I didn't appreciate the ending and it seemed like Rao had more to say, it's definitely a book journey you shouldn't take alone. You'll want to talk to someone about it when you're finished!

I really liked this book. Here in 2018, Women's Rights are topics high on the public priority list, therefore this book about two Indian women and their plights was both timely and moving. For me, Girls Burn Brighter was a stark contrast to some of the ways I feel the feminist movement has gone astray. While the fight for women to be seen as equal in value to men is valid, this novel reminded me that some women in the world are still fighting to even be seen as HUMAN, much less equal. This novel was difficult to read because while I don't think the plight of the feminist in America is bad, it seems so much of it is so trivial (first world problems) when compared to Poornima and Savitha, who represent a large percentage of the GLOBAL plight of women. There is so much more to women's rights than which million dollar actress is getting paid as much as her $10 million dollar male counterpart.. In America women are fighting to get free birth control while these two women are fighting to have LIFE beyond simply being disposable playthings of men.

The story was dramatic, disturbing, and frankly hopeless in my mind. I appreciate the honesty about a culture I never knew much about or paid much attention to. The thing that really sets it apart for me is that it genuinely opened my eyes to what the REAL feminist movement is about. Sometimes the message gets lost to me amid the demands of the spoiled elite, but there is a real crisis for women globally. This book made me start really paying attention to what I might be able to do to help create equal opportunity (not "outcome" to quote my friend, Erin ) for women of the WHOLE world.

This was a tough one to read as it is heartbreakingly sad but oh so lovely as well! When the two young girls, Poornima and Savitha meet, they are drawn to each other through poverty as well as innocence. They are soon separated by a series of more-than-unfortunate events, and the rest of the book is told alternately though each of their eyes. as they endure atrocity after atrocity in their quests for "normal" lives. But what is one to do when poverty is all you've ever known, and you are an uneducated Indian woman tossed out by your family? You do what you must to survive. Enough said. Beautiful and poetic prose make this a must-read even as it's often painful to witness what the two young woman must suffer through.

I struggled to write this review and to figure out how many stars to give this book. When I first finished it, I tentatively gave it 3 stars, but upon reflection I’ve rounded that up to 4.

This is a very dark book. It spans 4 years of the friendship between two girls from a small village in India. Poornima and Savitha, whose names mean moon and sun respectively, meet by chance when Savitha is hired to help Poornima’s family with their weaving loom. They become inseparable, and love each other fast and fiercely. They have found each other at a time when things are beginning to change. Poornima’s father has begun trying to arrange her marriage, and Savitha’s optimism and strength helps Poornima recognize that marriage might not be the be-all, end-all that she believes it to be. Both Savitha and Poornima have lost their mothers, but Poornima’s father is cruel, whereas Savitha’s father is kind and loving, despite his disability and alcoholism. These childhood details, and an event that separates the two young women and changes everything, set the stage for an epic tale of friendship, cruelty, and hope that spans the globe. The world is not kind to women, and Poornima and Savitha experience this in all sorts of ways.

After their separation, Poornima never stops searching for Savitha, and spends the next 4 years learning, working, and scheming on how to find her. Savitha has a similar journey, but she bears the brunt of a lot of abuse, even more than Poornima, and I found myself very frustrated by the end of the book for the level of violence inflicted upon Savitha. It is important to note that both women maintain their strength and hope throughout the terrible ordeals; their resilience is a remarkable thing, and their love for each other buoys them when it seems all hope is lost.

The reason I struggled to rate this book is two-fold: One, the ending was abrupt and kind of staggered to the end. There is a long story from a very minor character that holds up the ending, and doesn’t seem to have any bearing or relevance to the plot. The story is very upsetting, and really seemed like an odd tonal choice. The ending itself left a lot to be desired, but I can be convinced of open endings, so let me know if you enjoyed the ending.

The other reason I struggled with the rating is that the level of violence, assault, rape, and really disturbing imagery kind of crossed my limit. There is a scene towards the end involving a character that really upset me, and honestly, I found it a little gratuitous considering what had already occurred throughout the story. But after mulling it over, I decided that if a book made me that uncomfortable, it means it has some truths to tell, and being pushed out of my comfort zone is an eye-opening and valuable experience. I would recommend this book for that alone.

Side note: the writing is incredible, and I will absolutely read Rao’s other work.

So all the trigger warnings for this book. It is a hard read. There is violence, there is rape and lots of terrible things happen to these two women. The writing is beautiful so it gets four stars just for that. But it was hard to stomach everything else. And the ending was definitely lacking.

Devastating is hardly an adequate adjective to describe the horrors visited on the two central characters of Rao’s scorching debut, and by extension uncounted numbers of actual impoverished women and female children in India, some of whose suffering occasionally appears in stories in our newspapers. This saga of cruelty, subjugation, sexual abuse, marital oppression, prostitution and pain of other heart-wrenching kinds also, of course, comes perfectly timed to ride the current wave of female outrage animating voices of resistance in many countries.

Following on from her noted short story collection An Unrestored Woman, Rao has delivered a tale of female friendship between two pained souls, Poornima and Savitha, whose home village in India is a renowned weaving centre. Poornima has known little tenderness in life. Her recollections of time spent with her mother, and of simple caring moments, such as having her hair combed, are scattered points of light in a parched existence dominated by servitude to a callous father and young siblings. Savitha’s family is even poorer, her father having drunk away such money as they had. Although her childhood was spent picking over trash heaps, Savitha is blessed with spinning and weaving skills which bring her into the employment of Poornima’s father. Once the girls meet, a bond springs to life, infinite and unbreakable, bringing tenderness and hope to existences filled with work, heat, dust and the merest scraps of self-determination.

Inevitably the girls will be separated, each moving toward a different version of tragedy, Poornima’s through marriage into a rapacious family whose response to a shortfall in their dowry expectations is cold-blooded and appalling. Savitha’s suffering begins earlier, with rape, but far worse will follow. These are women who will be stripped down to their essences – survival, endurance, and the flickering spirit that lifts them above the trials of their flesh.

While later sections of this novel begin to take on a less plausible and striking form, its overwhelming momentum derives from Rao’s panorama of a culture still deeply immersed in extreme gender disparity: ‘Every moment in a woman’s life was a deal, a deal of her body: first for its blooming and then for its wilting; first for her bleeding and then for her virginity and then for her bearing and then for her widowing.’ Money might soften the contours or widen the possibilities, but the structure is rotten and, at its, worst medieval.

Narrated in simple phrasing, the book offers poetic and philosophical moments, alert to the endless beauties of life, even when lived at its harshest. A scrap of cloth, a piece of fruit, an empty sky – all illumine the text. But there’s a continuous thread of rage too, often seen in Rao’s continuous metaphor of light and fire which bears both the worst and best of these women’s existences.

This book needs an epilogue of some kind. The way it ends, so abruptly, with no payoff or closure, is really unsatisfying. It's a wonderful book, but there needs to be some kind of closure.

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2284803552
My review can be found at Goodreads.

A beautiful and compelling story of the deep and loving connection between two women.

This novel is set in India where two young, poor girls Poornima and Savitha cross paths and form a bond that is ultimately tested but becomes stronger as the years go on. Both girls grew up in a culture where men rule and women are looked down on. Poornima, who lost her mother now is forced into caring for her father and to take care of her siblings. She is also going to be handed off in an arranged marriage.Then your introduced to Savitha who begins working for her father. Savitha saw and lived life differently from Poornima. The two girls became the best of friends and truly loved one another. Then because of a horrific incident Savitha was forced to leave her family, no other choice but to run away. Soon after, Poornima was married off. She also experienced unimaginable acts of cruelty and she also ran away to escape her arranged marriage. Poornima, determined to find Savitha traveled into India's underworld and eventually to Seattle.

This was such a captivating read and I enjoyed this fully. Thanks to NetGalley!!

Fabulous book. Thoroughly loved. Highly recommend!

"Girls Burn Brighter" by Shobha Rao is a poetic tale about two young women, Poornima and Savitha, whose lives intertwine amid hardship until circumstances force them apart with both trying to find their way back to each other.

Poornima, a village girl in India, loses her mother to cancer while her cruel father is trying to marry her off. Her father needs money to care for the family and to pay for her dowry, so he hires Savitha to weave saris for the wedding season. Though the same age as Poornima and poorer, Savitha saves her money for her younger sisters' dowries. Knowing Savitha may not get enough food at home, Poornima tries to prepare her a hearty lunch. They bond over Savitha's love to eat rice with banana, an expensive treat that Poornima has a difficult relationship with since she would buy bananas for her then-ailing mother. They soon become inseparable until Poornima's father does the unthinkable to Savitha, who leaves for another life as Poornima's life changes as well.

Lyrically told, the story is heartbreaking and triumphant as the women handle dangerous and disfiguring traumas but stay hopeful in finding each other again. The theme of them facing adversity on top of adversity because they were born female in a patriarchal society comes up often naturally. For example, the author portrays Poornima's father as mean-spirited while Savitha's father, a recovering alcoholic with arthritis, uplifts her. The women also try to figure out who the bad men are in their situations as the good men may be in the background afraid to act in their defense with bad women being thrown in the mix with allegiance to the bad men. The story is so effortlessly constructed as it's entertaining with pulling on every emotion.

The first 50 pages of this are 5 stars...and then nothing happy or pleasant or PG rated happens ever again. The author has this interesting way of leaving out graphic details that somehow makes what she's writing about even more unsavory. I usually love dark and depressing but for me this was too much of both.

“But what about love?”

“What is love, Poori?” Savitha said. “What is love if not a hunger?”

When Poornima’s mother dies, her father hires a young girl named Savitha to work the sari loom her mother once toiled at. Though far more poverty-striken than Poori, her passion for life burns brighter than seems possible in such drudgery. Poornima is stunned by the conditions Savitha lives in, piles of trash near the huts, stray dogs sniffing around, cow dung walls, discarded tin for roof, by comparison she and her father live in a palace. That despite these conditions Savitha has a loving bond with her father surprises her. Love isn’t enough, though, in this world that rages against girls and poverty robs families of any hope for the security of their daughter’s future. A deep bond forms between the girls, who become like beloved sisters more than friends. Savitha’s full of wisdom, never one to let her circumstances tarnish her soul until one ill-fated moment, while making a beautiful sari for her beloved friend’s upcoming arranged marriage, a cruel act destroys all hope and causes her to flee. Poornima is left behind, with no other choice than to be a good wife and daughter-in-law too learns what it means to be swallowed by others expectations and cruel demands. She finds out being female is a price to pay, a punishment, a curse. She has never forgotten her dear Savitha, and goes to great extremes to find her.

Savitha’s life takes shocking turns, beyond anything her once sunny disposition would lead her to imagine. Too, the appalling transgressions against women the world over becomes a nightmare Savitha will know too well. In order to escape cruelty, young women find themselves cornered, deceived and trapped. America is the place to start over, but this isn’t the usual immigrant’s tale of hope and freedom. Poornima will do everything she can to find out what happened to Savitha, but will she be able to save herself in the process?

While a tale of friendship, and strength in the face of adversity it also encompasses terrible cruelties. Much as Poornima was protected when her mother was alive and told to ‘look away’ from the very places Savitha comes from, she quickly learns the world harbors far more horrifying fates. It’s not an easy read so if you are looking for a tale of happy fate, this isn’t for you. It’s at turns humbling and heartbreaking. Wonderfully written, a lot for any book club to chew on.

Publication Date: March 6, 2018

Flatiron Books

A gut wrenching tale of female friendship in the middle of a male dominated culture. Beautifully written. The story itself felt vaguely familiar to me. I think it is similar to other books I’ve read. A little too bleak to be a full pick.