Wasn’t sanity like beauty, in the eye of the beholder?
Parini Shroff, The Bandit Queens
This one is another recommendation from cari of the cari can read YouTube channel from a while ago. Its been in my to-be-read pile for a while now and since I was in the mood for more “fun” reads I decided to pick this up.
At the surface level this book appears to be a story about women having their revenge on the no-good husbands. A classic tale. Underneath the surface however is a tale that is very Indian. The story is set in a rural village in Gujarat, India and deals with themes like caste segregation, patriarchy, and police corruption. I’m not Indian so I can’t say if the themes the book touches on are done well or not.
A word of warning: this book includes graphic descriptions of domestic abuse, murder and sexual assault. More specifically, there is one scene in the book where the main character is sexually assaulted and it is graphically described. To the book’s credit, the scene makes sense within the context of the narrative and it is not gratuitous or overly long.
Thankfully, due to Storygraph’s content warnings for this book, I knew this was going to happen. However for people who are just going to pick up this book without encountering external content warnings, I am once again requesting that authors put content warnings at the beginning of their books, especially for graphic descriptions of sexual assault.
Overall, I found the story generally interesting; well defined complex characters and cartoonishly evil villains. The ending of the book was satisfying. If I rated media, I would give this book a 7/10 rating. Not terrible, but not mind blowing either.