Burnt Sugar: A Novel

Loved the touching, multilayered portrayal of the mother/daughter relationship amd the fact that this book defies genre or predictability.Many of us can relate to the complex feelings that surround caring for parents who werent able to care for us, and that is poignantly portrayed. The book made me think and left me with many unanswered questions.

This book caught my attention last year when it was shortlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize. I waited anxiously to be published in the U.S. And in 2021, Burnt Sugar was longlisted for the Women’s Prize. I had one more reason to read it, and the book did not let me down.The book tells us about Antara’s relationship with her mother. The story is told by Antara’s perspective, a woman who lives in Pune, India, with her US born husband. Antara and her mom did not have the best mother-daughter relationship and now our narrator is being forced to confront her past. Tara, the mother, was an absent mother who is now showing early signs of dementia and Antara is going to take care of her.There is a sense of neglect and competition among them. Tara raised her daughter poorly and inflicted endless bodily trauma on Antara. The story reveals the expectations and failures of familial love. It is also about memory, how much we remember and how we remember, if we remember at all.The writing is beautiful. Sharp, dark, unsettling, but beautiful. The characters are complex and fascinating. It is not an easy read and that is why Burnt Sugar is just for a few.

I was frankly disappointed by Avni Doshi’s acclaimed novel Burnt Sugar. Her portrait of an artistic daughter’s abuse by her mother, now suffering from dementia, echoes too many others to offer a fresh perspective. As a visual artist, I hoped Doshi would describe the creative process of her protagonist, Antara, and render her drawings vividly enough for me to picture them. She does neither. As a writer (see my Amazon author page www.amazon.com/author/asewovenwords), I looked for finely observed details about the setting, fully developed characters, and revelatory interactions. While Doshi’s cultural commentary is intriguing, especially on the differences between the narrator’s Indian-born upbringing and her husband’s American-born Indian background, much of this rich territory goes unexplored. Nor did her images of Pune today, and the ashram where Antara and her mother lived during Antara’s childhood, provide the depth I wanted. The main drawback was that I wasn’t invested in the characters; ergo Antara’s secret and postpartum meltdown did not elicit much reaction. Burnt Sugar is neither acrid nor sweet enough to deliver a shiver of surprise nor the satisfaction of inevitability.

I usually like to read a book specifically for self care Sundays. It’s my ME time as a mom so I’ll start a book one Sunday and read it each Sunday until I’m done. I finished this in one day! So good!

I found this book to be poorly written. The characters are thinly sketched, the settings are poorly described, the metaphors are ill conceived and the timeline is so skewed it is hard to follow at times. I found myself rereading passages to clarify the plot line since the transitions between scenes were so miserably drawn. The author has not depicted the characters’ humanity so they are portrayed as being hollow, shallow and even highly unlikeable. As a result you feel no emotional connection to them and only feel disdain for their poor choices and ignorance. I don’t think I have ever disliked a book quite as much. I read it through to the end trying to ascertain a glimpse of why this would be Booker Prize material. I am at a loss. This book would have benefited from the deft hand of a skillful editor and writing coach.

It’s easy to see why Avni Doshi’s Burnt Sugar was shortlisted for last year’s Booker Prize. She has a unique voice, and a take on motherhood that shocks from the opening sentence: “I would be lying if I said my mother’s misery has never given me pleasure.” This is spoken by Antara, the daughter, whose mother, Tara, named her to be her foil. Tara abandoned her daughter to follow a guru in an ashram when Antara was a baby.Many readers have difficulty encountering a mother who insists on putting her own needs above those of her baby daughter. Mothers are supposed to be archetypes of self-sacrifice. In this novel, however, even Antara wishes her baby would hurry up and grow up to be independent of her. Equally Antara’s grandmother shocks us when she wonders how they will pry the jewelry off her daughter Tara’s hands when she dies because she’s put on so much weight.The novel alternates between scenes from Antara’s childhood in Pune in western India and her adult life as a wife and mother herself at a time when her mother has lost most of her memory as a result of early onset Alzheimer’s.Memory is a predominant motif throughout the novel. Antara is an artist who draws a man’s face and each day draws from the previous day’s drawing. That is how memory works, slowly receding from the initial experience. Tara’s doctor says “memory is a work in progress. It’s always being reconstructed.” In the end you have no idea, he says, whether “a memory is real or imagined.”This novel is not meant to be a page turner. It is a mixture of meditation, memory and reflection. It is beautifully written: “The grass sways. Tiny specks of life tremble on each blade, drops of dew, water and resin.” And it places motherhood under an unforgiving magnifying glass, searching for the language needed to be true to the reality.

Why are mothers automatically considered sacred? I gave this book three stars only because it bravely goes out on a limb to illustrate that not every mother is a "good mother" and therefore deserving of a pedistal. Some mothers are narcissistic, self-centered divas.Through the main character's own thoughts and questions about her relationship with her mother the reader is "given permission" to give voice to thoughts and questions that most people think but dont speak aloud regarding mothers, mothers in-law, and mothering...Otherwise, I found tbe book to be disjointed and depressing

Haven't started reading the book yet but would like to appreciate the packaging and the quality of the book from the seller.

I bought this book because of its interesting themes: memory, the mother-daughter relationship, aging, postpartum depression.However, the characters are so completely unlikable that I lost interest in their stories. In addition, I didn’t like the author’s occasional attempts to disgust or shock her readers with throw-away lines about the sexual abuse of a child, bodily secretions, filth, and so on. She succeeded, but I found nothing meaningful in these passages.I am surprised this novel captured the attention of the Booker Prize Committee. It wasn’t just disappointing, it was almost vile.

I didn't enjoy this read very much. In fact I nearly abandoned it!A dysfunctional family in India in an unhappy situation.

Dull as ditchwater.The Booker list is not what it used to be.