Thank you for approving me for this title. After some thought, I’ve realized it’s not quite the right fit for me personally, so I won’t be able to provide a full review. I appreciate the opportunity to access it and wish the book great success.

I'm seriously impressed by how this book conveyed things that are very hard to commit to writing. I could see the dance so vividly in my mind.

This book touches on a lot of important themes such as gender roles, expectations, feminism, mental health, etc, and we can see as the narrator grows, experiences, and struggles. It was hard to get into and reflect on, but the insight is very meaningful.

A fantastic follow-up to Swamy's fantastic story collection A House is a Body, this novel follows Vidya as she navigates through Bombay in the 60s and 70s and the tangled story of her family. A compelling novel that explores the way art and expression can transform life, Swamy's beautiful writing backs up a brilliant story.

The Archer is a coming-of-age story set around 1970s Mumbai, in India. Overall, the plot read like it was carefully planned out and the language was used in a very precise manner. Pervasive feelings throughout the story included feelings of longing, wistfulness, and sadness from the main character often not being able to reach for the things that she wants because of self-imposed and societal barriers. Dance is used as a large metaphor for the momentum that sweeps through the main character's life and mirrors her existence closely.

This wonderful book is about one woman's journey through dancing, marriage and family responsibilities. This book highlights subjects such as feminism, gender roles, sexuality and many more. This book reads almost like a memoir and I read each section as such. I enjoyed this book and its unique style.

Shruti Swamy’s The Archer is a coming of age story set in the 60s and 70s, and a love letter to dance. The Archer explores the power of love, and dance, while touching on themes of identity, gender roles, sexuality, duty, feminism, colorism, and mental health.

A coming of age story set in Bombay, where a young woman decides during her younger years that she wants to dance and not be a mother or wife in the 1960's and 70's. Not only was that un heard of during that time in that area, as most of us know, life doesn't always go the way we imagine it when we're younger. We don't really know what exact age she is at the beginning of the book, but she was probably a preteen, early teen, at about 1/3 of the way through the book, she is 17.

The Cover is absolutely intriguing and beautiful, and that's what drew me to the book. Some parts of the story was interesting, and some of it fell flat for me. It was a struggle for me at the beginning of the book. I did especially enjoy some of the cultural references in the story.. I did enjoy the main character and what she had to deal with.

The Archer is a beautifully lyrical and gently written coming of age story set in the 1960s and '70s in Bombay/Mumbai. Originally released in 2021, this reformat which coincides with the paperback release came out 9th Aug. It's 320 pages, and is also available in hardcover, audio, and ebook formats from the Algonquin Press.

The author, Shruti Swamy, is a gifted wordsmith. There's a precise and conscious use of language which sometimes felt a tiny bit overwrought. She also has something worthwhile to say, so the writing is absolutely not window dressing in this case; there's a substantial story conveyed in the prose.

There was a pervasive sense of sadness and wistfulness about the limits imposed on the main character by her family situation and to a larger degree, her culture. The metaphor of a type of dance with a still center and wildly whirling and kinetic outside movement are aptly used to mirror the realities of Vidya's existence.

I enjoyed the descriptions of the settings as well as the minutiae of the dance included in the story. Highly recommended for fans of slice-of-life stories and family sagas. Competently written.

Four stars.

Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes.

Life is not what you expect it to be. You make plans and life takes you in opposite direction. Vidya was experiencing this first hand: she lost her mother and forced to become a mother of the house, then she wanted to be an engineer yet she didn’t end up practicing it, then she got married. She was meant to be an independent soul who just danced. The tone of the story changed drastically from age to age and made it easier to understand Vidya’s disappointment.

An important distinction was hidden between sentences describing ripeness of a mango and I felt seen: “ Each day, the afternoons grew hotter and the mango grew more ripe. I spent days studying for my final exams, studying alone, mostly alone, because I was the only woman in my batch in my major, which was Electrical Engineering normally popular, but this year the other women had all opted for Chemical or Mechanical. I would glance up at the fruit.”

And this defines eternal dilemma of a troubled, unsupported woman who felt stuck: “ First you want to die, now you don't. You claimed you'd never give up dance, then you did. You said you'd become an engineer, then you didn't. You swore you'd never marry, then you married. You didn't want to live with your in-laws, now your husband this very minute is moving your things to their place. You said you loved this man, now you want to leave him. You didn't believe in your mother until she was dead, then you wanted her back. You didn't want to be a mother, and you're having a child. You're having a child now, and you're going to be a mother. You're not going to die, but what are you going to do now? What kind of way is this to live?”

Many thanks to NetGalley and Algonquin Books for gifting me a digital ARC of this debut novel by Shruti Swamy and allowing me to participate in the blog tour. 4 stars!

Vidya grew up with the expectations of her father and tradition in the 1960s in Bombay. She was expected to take care of her father and younger brother after her mother left. She was expected to act like a girl and not play with the boys she so desperately wanted to. She was expected to go to college and become an engineer, only to return home and take care of her father. But when she sees a dance performance called Kathak, she is desperate to learn and perfect the art. But can she dance and go to school, marry and have a child? At what cost?

This was a beautifully written coming-of-age story that goes beyond the normal. The author takes the reader on a journey of Vidya's experiences, where she is always facing others expectations based on her gender, race, class. Always in the background of her choices is her elusive mother. This was a slower read and it moves abruptly into different times of Vidya's life, which makes reading it a bit more of a challenge. But it is haunting, beautiful and will definitely cause you to pause and think.

The Archer shows the past and present of Vidya. I really loved the exploration of her love for Kathak dancing. I also liked the discussion of going against societal expectations.

This book is so beautiful and poignant, and I loved reading a novel set in a time and place that are totally new to me. This book is both a tugger of heartstrings, and also very inspiring. Thanks so much to the publisher and NetGalley for the opportunity to read it.

This is a well written book. It has some fine lines, a few well conceived set pieces, a fair share of perceptive and insightful observations, and lean dialogue. That said, try as I might I found neither the characters, nor their situations, nor the overall narrative engaging enough to arouse or hold my curiosity and attention. As a consequence, it doesn't seem fair to write much more of a review, apart from encouraging inquisitive readers to give the book a try.

I didn’t like this book that much but I respected what it was trying to achieve (hence the three stars). I thought the language, though sometimes beautiful, was also distracting and created a distance that made it hard to be drawn in to the story. I was continually aware that I was reading a book; the story didn’t come to life for me. Yet there are some memorable and beautiful scenes and excellent parts of the novel. I wished I had more of an emotional connection to the characters but never felt close to Vidya and found many of the relationships were just not fully developed.

The Archer is quite a tragically beautiful story that talks about motherhood, growing up and trauma.

In the beginning it was pretty hard to get into, since it did have a slow start. There are also a few time-skips, since the story does encompass almost Vidya's entire life. However the way that Shruti Swamy writes, almost like poetry, had a musicality to it that felt very much reflected into Vidya's passion and love for Kathak, with the bells. Especially in the end where a lot of things come together, and certain things get answered, that you didn't even know really required an answer.
The book also has quite philosophical and a naturalistic way of looking at the themes that are discussed inside of the book. Which made it very interesting to kind of think about it in-between reads. Overall an alright read, definitely.

This a review for an arc from NetGalley.

Once again I was mesmerized by Shruti’s writing, but mesmerizing writing doesn’t make up for the rest of it. I found myself not being able to connect to the protagonist in any of the timelines and found it hard to want to keep reading on. I found that there are a lot of lengthy descriptions that didn't make up for lack of plot movement. This book needed more movement in plot, it felt very stagnant to me compared to all of the short stories Shruti's previous collection.

I honestly wasn't sure what to expect from this one - my first experience with this author. But I consistently enjoy the books that this publisher has invited me to read, so I had a good feeling going in. Lyrically written, this book covers narrator Vidya's life from childhood to motherhood. Set in India, the book has an almost timeless feel to it. The richness of the setting really shines - from the buildings, to the clothing and the many flavors.

At a young age, Vidya discovers dancing and soon devotes her life to her craft. The book, overall, is a rather melancholy one - but there's beauty amongst these pages as well as tragic moments, I think that this title would be a great choice for book clubs, as I feel there's a lot to discuss here. It touches a lot on the treatment of women, Indian society, mental health - all within a coming-of-age story format. I think that it did end a bit abruptly - but mostly because I wanted to see where Vidya would go next. It's beautifully written and I am looking forward to reading more from Swamy in the future!

This debut novel by Shruti Swamy, about the coming of age of Vidya, a young Gujarati girl, is as much an art form as the classical Kathak dance she performs.

The novel begins quite ethereally, with no names or specific grounding in place, hours indicated by colors and dripping with the emotions of longing and anger that we can't quite place. As a girl who has lost her mother and must care for her father and brother, the protagonist's situation slowly comes into focus as she grows. Her pursuit of dance and life then takes center stage. The author snapshots different times in Vidya's life, each in vivid detail, but the transitions are often abrupt and unexpected. To me, this was exactly like Vidya's wild spinning before the final stomp in her dance, that fraction of a moment between movement and stillness.

Vidya pursues dance as a calling and a way out of poverty, plus her expected role as a girl in 1960s Indian society. We watch her life unfold and her dreams take shape until reality interrupts, another unexpected transition. In depicting a lonely path, Shruti Swamy creates a lonely, haunting novel, well worth it for its depiction of both pleasure and pain.

Published by Algonquin Books on September 7, 2021

Like many stories set in India, The Archer is about contrasts of privilege. While the story involves (and is promoted as) a woman’s quest to improve herself as a dancer, it is more fundamentally a relationship drama involving a wealthy man who weds a poor woman over his family’s objections and imposes his family’s expectations upon her. That drama is set against the backdrop of Bombay in the 1960s and the social restraints imposed by Indian society upon women.

Vidya was raised in a chaali, a communal, gossipy group “where children were largely left to their own devices, with a distracted eye of some mother glancing out from time to time over each child, and come suppertime a child could be fed in any house it visited.” Vidya’s father traveled for work and was usually absent from the home. Her mother died (by means that Vidya’s memory has suppressed) when Vidya was young, leaving Vidya to be raised by her father and giving her the duty of raising a younger brother who becomes entirely dependent upon her. As a boy, Vidya’s brother is the family’s more important child. Vidya’s assigned role — a role she eventually rejects — is to take care of the home and to assure that her brother’s and father’s needs are met.

As a girl, Vidya wanted to play the tabla, a drum that only boys are allowed to play. Her mother told her, perhaps prophetically, that if she asks why she isn’t allowed to do something, she will always be unhappy. Vidya’s grandmother tells her that “sometimes god puts a soul in the wrong body” and that Vidya should have been a boy with her “restless” and “unsatisfied” nature. Boys can find an outlet for their restlessness but, as a girl, Vidya is fated to get married and live in her mother-in-law’s home. Vidya tells her grandmother that she will never get married. Fate, circumstances, social pressure, and even love all make it difficult for Vidya to keep that promise.

Vidya’s true calling, she believes, is to be a dancer. Much of the novel explores Vidya’s love of dance, her perseverance in dance lessons despite a strictness from her instructors that almost borders on cruelty, her relationships with those instructors and her occasional performances.

In her first-person narrative, Vidya also describes her decision to leave home and to attend college. Vidya’s only true friend is a student named Radha, another woman whose soul is in the wrong body. Vidya’s relationship with Radha illustrates another taboo that limits the choices both women are allowed to make.

Vidya narrates her eventual marriage to Rustom, a young man who comes from a prosperous family and who seems attentive and kind, a man whose values appear to be more western than traditional Indian in his regard of women as (almost) equal partners in a marriage. Since Rustom’s family holds Vidya in little regard (she doesn’t meet their standard for social class, refined manners, or skin color), their only real expectation is that she produce a male child that they fully intend to raise.

Like many stories from India, The Archer is notable for its depiction of the clash between ancient traditions that favor the upper classes and encroaching western notions of fairness and equality. Vidya’s defiance of her husband, father, in-laws, teachers, and society is commendable, but her defiance is at war with her feelings of inadequacy, promoted by a culture that views her gender and dark skin as liabilities. Only when she becomes lost in a dance does she feel at peace with her nature, allowing her to “move deeper into my body as the world became sharper.”

Vidya lives her life in conflict, proving the truth of her grandmother’s observation that she cannot reconcile herself. Vidya wants one thing and settles for another. Her plans to become an engineer, to never marry, and to always dance are at odds with the life she must live. At the end of the novel, Vidya makes a choice between dependence and independence. The choice is not one that will make her happy, at least not in the moment, but there may be no choice that will produce immediate happiness. She instead bases the choice on how she believes her conflicts can be reconciled for the best, and maybe that’s the long distance route to a happy life.

The novel’s title comes from a character in an epic story from ancient India, a gifted archer who sliced off his thumb so that he would never be better than his teacher. When a dance teacher explains the story’s relationship to dharma, Vidya doesn’t understand it. By the novel’s end, she understands how to relate the story to her own life. I can’t say I ever quite got the point, but Vidya is clearly smarter than I am.

The plot may seem be familiar to readers who have encountered similar stories. While the novel does not stand apart from other entries in the field, I appreciated Shruti Swamy’s unwillingness to force a happy ending upon Vidya. In the current century, Vidya might have more choices. In her time and place and given her circumstances, she needs to make choices that work for her, even if no choices will allow her to put her soul into a body that will allow her to live as she pleases.

Swamy’s prose captures the rhythms of dance, sometimes spinning, speeding up and slowing down, progressing and retreating. She is an observant writer, and while I could have done with fewer observations of red or yellow or blue saris, she captures the atmosphere of a Bombay that is divided between the cultured silence of the privileged and the chattering voices of the chaali. The Archer should capture the attention and perhaps the hearts of readers who appreciate honest stories of women who find a path to some form of independence, even if the best available path is not the one that fulfills their dreams.

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