This novel appeared on the shortlist for the 2020 Booker Prize for Fiction so I was anxious to read it and requested a digital galley before its North American release date of January 26. Unfortunately, it was a disappointment.

The narrator is Antara, a woman in her mid-thirties living in Pune, India. Her mother Tara seems to be in the early stages of dementia and Antara is left caring for a mother who didn’t take care of her daughter. In sections set in the 1980s, we see Tara moving into an ashram to be the mistress of a guru; to do so she abandons her marriage and becomes estranged from her parents. She takes Antara with her but neglects her: “she would disappear every day, dripping with milk, leaving me unfed.” For a time, the two live on the streets. Though married and financially secure, Antara knows that her childhood continues to affect her life: “my mother leaving my father, and my father letting us both go, has coloured my view of all relationships.”

Tara is an interesting, though unlikeable, character. As a young woman, Tara is a free spirit obsessed with self-actualization, with pursuing her own dreams. She lacks inhibition and lives her life free of guilt; she refuses the demands of motherhood and makes no apologies for her behaviour. Though one might admire her desire for personal growth and happiness, there is no doubt that she is selfish. Antara describes her mother as emotionally immature: “emotionally, she has never progressed past being a teenager. She is still at the mercy of hormones. She still thinks in terms of freedom and passion. And love.” When angry or hurt, she lashes out at Antara, slapping her and calling her “’a fat little bitch.’” Tara tends to compare herself to her daughter: she would compare their bodies and comment that “her breasts were bigger than mine, but my waist was smaller. She would comment on how my positive attributes were a symptom of age, declaring with certainty that my ugliness would surpass hers when I reached my forties. . . . she was pleased to tell me these things, to know that I would suffer as she had . . . did she ever see me as a child . . . [or] Did she always see me as a competitor, or, rather, an enemy?”

Antara tends to receive sympathy from the reader as she details her childhood of abuse and neglect. But then it becomes clear that Antara is not flawless. Her behaviour towards her mother can be interpreted as self-preservation or as revenge. She suffers from post-partum depression and her thoughts are distressing: “I am tired of this baby. She demands too much, always hungering for more. . . . I’ve never been a stickler for manners, but this baby doesn’t stand on ceremony. She’s a rude little bitch if I ever met one.”

There is also some suggestion that Antara is not a reliable narrator. Her memories of the past cannot be verified by Tara who is losing her memory but Antara’s grandmother questions the accuracy of some of her granddaughter’s memories. Tara may be suffering from memory loss caused by dementia but perhaps Antara’s memory is selective. One character says, “’We are all unreliable. The past seems to have a vigour that the present does not.’” It is interesting that Antara several times refers to madness (“This is madness. I feel it – I inch towards it daily”) and at least two other people refer to her madness: “’Hoarding this garbage will make you madder than you are’” and “’You should worry about your own madness instead of mine.’”

This book can be commended for its depiction of the complicated emotions a caregiver can experience when trying to care for a person with whom she has had a difficult relationship. However, it didn’t captivate me, and I found myself wanting to skim just to reach the end of the book. The discussions of Antara’s art go on and on. Some events, like the trip to Goa, seem irrelevant. Perhaps I just wasn’t in the right frame of mind but trying to decipher the significance of some of the digressions just didn’t appeal.

The winner of the 2020 Booker Prize, Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart, also deals with a complex parent-child relationship. Its examination is so realistic, empathetic, and powerful that the book left me in awe. The depiction of the parent-child relationship in Burnt Sugar is less successful so I’m not surprised that it didn’t win the prestigious award.

Note: I received an eARC from the publisher via NetGalley.

“We actively make memories, you know. And we make them together. We remake memories, too, in the image of what other people remember.”

In Burnt Sugar, Avni Doshi explores how we build and maintain relationships as Antara supports her mother Tara as memory slips away and dementia takes hold.

For me, Burnt Sugar was a deeply unsettling read. It starts as a conventional story of a daughter dealing with the onset of Alzheimer’s in a parent. It includes the flashbacks you’d expect in that kind of narrative. But as mother Tara loses her memories and Antara explores her own, the boundaries between past and present, mother and daughter, real and imagined become increasingly blurry and we find ourselves uncertain of what we can trust.

If you’ve been close to someone as dementia has progressed, this book may evoke familiar feelings about the fickleness of memory. When suddenly the person who you’ve shared a memory with no longer remembers it or does so in a completely distorted fashion, you start to question the solidity of what you thought was an indisputable fact. If our relationships are built through shared experiences, what’s left when the memories start to break down, fall apart, or become unrecognizable? What is lost and what is revealed?

Having had a parent with dementia, I recognized that feeling of having a parent who is there but not there. That feeling of being adrift, of being unsure of the future but also increasingly insecure in the past. When their grasp on reality slips, the reverberations shake yours as well. The responsibilities of care-giving hone down our feelings to their very roots. As the person you knew ceases to exist, you’re forced to face what you know and how you feel and it haunts every moment of your day. Doshi has captured the overwhelming, claustrophobic burden of care and memory in a story I won’t soon forget.

I can definitely understand why Burnt Sugar was on the Booker Prize short list. It’s a powerful exploration of what happens when the carer roles switch in a parent-child relationship. It’s the kind of book that makes you want to talk to someone about it when you finish.

Although it was nominated for The Booker Prize last summer it’s just now being released in North America (this coming Tuesday). Many thanks to Abrams Books and NetGalley for this eARC in exchange for an honest review.

Burnt Sugar is one of those books that has a lot of interesting messages but is so dark and at times unsettling that it’s hard to “enjoy.” I appreciated the book for its unflinching honesty, exploration of past trauma, and portrayal of incredibly toxic relationships

As Tara slowly loses her memory, her adult daughter struggles with her anger towards her mother and her obligation to be her caregiver. Unlikeable characters.

This is a poetic dissection of a deeply toxic mother-daughter relationship that also raises questions about memory. It's told in dual time line. In the present, Antara is dealing with her mother Tara's looming dementia as well as her own postpartum depression. It's also the story of Antara's youth, when Tara took her to an ashram and them essentially abandoned her in favor of a guru. Antara was cared for by another woman there and then sent to a horrid boarding school. How can Antara help a woman who was so disinterested in her as a child? Doshi packs a lot into this relatively slim novel (perhaps too much) which becomes perhaps a bit too graphic at times. Thanks to the publisher for the ARC of this Booker Long listed novel. Not, perhaps the most enjoyable read but a worthy one fans of literary fiction will admire.

This is a short novel set in India about a woman, Antara and her mother Tara. We learn early on that Tara is staring to forget things and they suspect it is Alzheimer’s. This is just a small part of the book which ultimately about mother’s and daughters and the connection that is always there (even if abuse has occurred).

I enjoyed this book and I could see very clearly where the author was going with the story and the relationship between Tara and Antara. I liked the flashbacks to when Antara was younger which explains a lot on why things are happening they way they are in present day. The book might now be for everyone but was definitely for me!

BURNT SUGAR by Avni Doshi is a compelling in-depth novel chronicling the relationship between Antara and her mother. Right away the topics in this book are intense as Antara’s mother deals with Alzheimer’s and reflects on their relationship and what it means to be a woman, daughter, wife and mother. It was really interesting to read about the Indian culture and I especially enjoyed how Antara’s career was as an artist. Her emotional state throughout her life was very chaotic yet relatable to me as the reader in what she had to deal with in her life. At times there was a lot to take in reading about all of Antara’s stresses in her life. Upon the end I’m glad to have read this book but I wouldn’t read it again.

Really dug into this one. Happy to include it in January's Novel Encounters, my monthly top ten roundup column of notable upcoming fiction titles for Zoomer magazine’s Books section. To read the feature, click on the link.

Set in modern day India, a woman raised with an emotionally detached mother comes to terms with her mom's old age and dementia.
She revisits her grief at abandonment and abuse from childhood. She holds much anger and resentment. Her old mother cannot understand as she has no memory of the events.
She alternates chapters in the present day, as her mother's sole caretaker, along with descriptions of living with various friends who her mother assigned to care for her as she lived a life as a devotee to a guru in an ashram, and then with various lovers afterward.

This is an unusual book. It is well-written and interior. It focuses on the protagonist Antara’s inner life as she reminisces about her childhood and young adulthood with her mother, who in the present day is incapacitated with early onset Alzheimer’s.

In some ways, the book feels plotless. It consists of vignettes. Those vignettes are vividly written. We feel the intense vulnerability of being the child of a free spirited mother determined to live life on her own terms. Many books extol the virtues of following one’s dreams, but this book shows how that can hurt a child.

The book is also about faith. The author describes several exploitive faith situations — sadistic nuns in a Catholic boarding school, a Baba who takes on women lovers and discards them, Hindu-Muslim riots and unreliable intrafaith loyalties.

Finally the book is about India, how it is changing, the expectations that Indian emigrants have about their country of origin. The book shows a side of India that American readers don’t often get to see. The promiscuous wives, the artists following their muses, divorced parents, drugs and drinking.

I didn’t love the book because it felt too interior. I gave it 4 stars (rounded up from 3.5) because it is well-written and has some powerful observations. This would be a great book for the right reader.

There are a lot of really interesting elements and ideas at play in this book, all of them laced with a hefty dose of sharpness. This is definitely a book for the reader with a penchant for "unlikeable" characters: hardly anyone is spared the narrator's sharpness of description, least of all herself. It feels unique in a lot of ways - the way the narrator approaches her mother's illness, for example, was at once unexpected and perfect - but at the same time there are certain plot twists that feel trite, and all too expected. If you read the book's synopsis, and see that it's a story about a mother and daughter, then I'll bet you can make the logical leap to what is involved in the climatic scenes at the end. I found that, in particular, dull and repetitious, and unlike the ingenuity that marks the earlier portions of this book.

And yet it didn't bother me as much as it could have, which is mainly down to the pacing. Doshi never lingers overlong on anything. If the writing is overwrought (and it is, in many places) it's only for a sentence or two before moving on. She moves the narrative back and forth in time with precision; giving us just enough of what we need to see of the past to let us know how it affects the story in the present. And it helps, too, that the book is relatively short, and that just at the point when it starts to get unwieldy, it ends. Because of that I was left more with the impression of it being interesting than over the top, and I feel like despite its flaws I would still absolutely recommend this book. Particularly if a reader is interested in mother-daughter stories.

Throughout Avni Doshi’s unsettling novel, Burnt Sugar, the protagonist is told by others that memories and realities are shared. We create memories together. Because no one’s memory is perfect, there is no one version of what happened. Unlike many of us, however, Antara’s account of her life is complicated by mental illness, dementia, and a large dollop of rewriting the past to tell whatever story the teller needs to convey. No one can be trusted in this novel—making it a perfect read for those of us who love diving into the motives of unreliable narrators.

We don’t learn Antara’s name until well into Burnt Sugar. We learn her mother’s name first: Tara. This little clue serves as notice that Antara is rarely the protagonist of her own life. Instead, Antara follows in her mother’s wake from a home she was too young to remember, to years at an ashram where she was cared for by an older devotee of the guru, to her grandmother’s house (with a brief stint in an abusive convent school), back into her mother’s neglectful care before she could strike out on her own. When we meet Antara—before all of this backstory is revealed—she appears to be a woman who has managed to marry and make a life for herself. This life is an illusion. Antara has never left her mother’s orbit. In fact, we meet Antara at a moment when she is being pulled back into her mother’s life because Tara is showing signs of dementia or Alzheimer’s.

I’ve always found it a bit strange that we only seem to have coming-of-age stories for characters moving from childhood into early adulthood. We don’t have a word for stories that capture the transition when adult children have to start taking care of their parents, although I’ve started to see more of these books being published. Coming-of-age stories give readers a blueprint to navigate increased responsibility and freedom. There are no such blueprints for characters and readers who have to look after the people who raised them, watching as those parents lose their ability to live independently. All that said, Burnt Sugar is not a blueprint. While Antara relentlessly quizzes her mother’s doctor for remedies and diets and answers and even offers to have Tara move in, her own struggle to accurately remember the past and deal with her emotional trauma combine to pull Antara apart as much as Tara’s mental health is doing the same to the older woman.

Burnt Sugar moves back and forth, from Antara’s present to her past. A lot is unspoken in this novel, but the way that Antara tells her stories made me think that there is a lot of inexpressible anger simmering underneath Antara’s efforts to appear normal. A psychologist would probably have better words to describe (or diagnose) Antara’s inability to face what Tara did to her as a child, to explain why Antara has such a hard time bonding with her own daughter after Anikka is born, or why Antara feels so cut off from others. But, as the old psychology joke goes: if it’s not one thing, it’s your mother. Tara has a lot to answer for in Burnt Sugar.

I found Burnt Sugar to be a very disturbing read. It turns a lot of expectations about mother-daughter relationships inside out, showing how they can become warped when a mother is unable or unwilling to care for her child. We see, in vivid detail, what can happen to a child who is left (mostly to strangers) to be raised and how damaging it can be for a child to know that they are only looked after by others because of obligation instead of love. Very few relationships in this book fulfill the characters in them. Because of this near-complete breakdown of family care, Burnt Sugar left me with a lot of questions about how families should be, how they ought to support members with mental health issues, and when it’s time (or if it’s even possible) to cut all ties and run for the hills.

BURNT SUGAR never really lifted from its pages and as a result, picking it up felt like a chore. I did enjoy Doshi's blunt characterization and use of place, yet she never really compelled me to invest beyond a fairly swift, unfocused skim. Anatara, our narrator, is endlessly perverse and obstinate, and is always finding herself in the most frustrating dilemmas with basically everyone she interacts with, particularly her mother. While her unreliability is understandable considering her upbringing, the resulting narration was always off-putting and precarious. Perhaps it is simply meant to be dynamic experiment in character? Sure, I'll give it that.

Thank you to Netgalley for giving me a free copy of this novel in exchange for an honest review!

I got about a third of the way through Burnt Sugar, and then my download for the book expired. Unfortunately, I was not able to finish the novel because of this. My review will be based on what I have read so far. The novel is terribly mundane. For example, this is how the story goes: "So my husband and I went out to eat, then I took my mother to her doctor's appointment, then we drove home and made more food" . . . etc. I do not want to read a bullet point list of these character's lives. Nothing exciting has happened so far, and the characters are not compelling to me. It feels like the main character is just complaining about her mother, and that isn't the type of story that I am into.

I am giving this a 2-star rating. It's not a horrible story, but not my thing. Maybe the story picks up in the second half, but I will never know, haha.

I admit I wasn't sure about this book at first--it seemed fraught and a little difficult to read. But I kept going, largely as a result of the buzz I had been hearing, and I'm glad I did. It's a terrific book about the intersection of love, obligation, and responsibility, self-knowledge, and the limits of love. Read it! (4 stars because I never give 5)

This is a searing tale of maternal disfunction and a daughter’s confused commitment to the parent who abused her. Cool but compelling and modern.

Such a messy, clever, nuanced read! This has to be one of the most vitriolic narrators I’ve ever read. I can’t wait to recommend this to adults looking for a complicated narrator and intergenerational story. While intergenerational stories are popular right now, this takes that setup and gives something totally different. This title shows such a nuanced expression of love and hatred and how it entwines itself with dependency, security, and discomfort. The language is simple and clear, yet harsh in its examination. I love that I can recommend this to most adult readers knowing it’s unlike anything I’ve ever read.

Very interesting story about a woman following her guru at all costs. I have known people who have done this so reading this novel was a special interest to me. It's a great tale of daughters and mothers as well.

BURNT SUGAR is harsh but memorable. Graphic but haunting. Difficult but rewarding.

The story works on two levels. The "superficial" story is about a toxic mother/daughter relationship, which is pretty captivating, if at times extremely disturbing. The deeper story is about memory and survival -- a nuanced examination of resiliency and the narratives of our lives.

Others have criticized the characterization, but I found it to be quite strong. This is not a book where everything is handed to the reader on a silver platter. You have to work for it.

Doshi writes with surgical precision and it's evident this book is well-crafted, even if it's not for the faint of heart.

Recommended for fans of serious literary fiction.

Stunning writing and a deep dive into a toxic mother/daughter relationship. While some of the scenes and lines were surgically precise, the overall package lacked structure and purpose for me.