The Bandit Queens by Parini Shroff
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
The premise sounded interesting, and I was looking forward to reading this for my March book club meeting. Instead, once I began reading, I found myself incredibly bored. I found the writing to be tedious. The mixture of English and traditional Indian words did not work for me. Several of the times the context clues didn’t make it clear what the author was referring to. Also, so many parts felt like the author had a thesaurus and set out to use as many obscure words as was humanly possible. I started keeping a list and realized I was spending way too much time googling the meanings of words when far simpler words would have done a better job of conveying meaning.
I know this is supposed to have been a comedy, but I honestly did not find it very funny. I definitely chuckled in a few parts but the majority of the time I was reading with a grim expression as I tried to make it to the end. The only reason I finished was because it was a book club pick.
The book does cover themes of classism, women’s rights, poverty, rape, abuse, marriage, body image, and friendship. Though I am grateful that my friendships do not mirror any of the ones seen in this book. I know this is an “own voice” novel and it reminds me of another one I read earlier this year “Hurricane Summer“. In both novels the authors claim to love the countries they are writing about but then proceed to write a one-dimensional story that shows only the negatives of a culture and nothing of its beauty.
Overall, I found this book to be a hard slog.
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