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Sep
25
Book Review: Bitter Sweets by Roopa Farooki
2008 at 8am Posted by Rebecca Joines Schinsky
Originally published September 2007. Available in paperback Tuesday, September 30, 2008.
Bitter Sweets is a story about families and deception and what a tangled web we weave when small lies inevitably turn into biggers ones. Or, in the case of this family, when big lies turn into even bigger ones.
It all begins when Bangladeshi thirteen-year-old Henna Rub’s scheming father arranges for her to marry Ricky/Rashid Karim by telling his family that Henna is older, well-educated, and worldly, while she is, in fact, lazy and illiterate. Henna goes along with the ploy hoping it will prevent her from having to endure further schooling and free her up to become a famous actress. By the time Rashid discovers that he and his family have been duped, it’s too late—they’re married, and that’s how they’re going to stay. The lie gives birth to an unhappy marriage, a generally neglected child named Shona, and a secret relationship between Ricky and a woman in England.
When Shona, at eighteen, runs off with her Pakistani boyfriend Parvez Khan, she intends to embark on a love marriage and create a life for herself away from her parents and their lies. However,
Golden Shona had been conceived with a lie, and was born in a liar’s house, and into an inevitable understanding that it was always better to comfort or conceal with a lie than to hurt or expose with the truth.
This lesson seems to be deeply ingrained, as after twenty years of a mostly happy marriage and raising twin boys Omar and Sharif, Shona begins spinning her own web of deception that ultimately complicates her relationships with her husband, her sons, and her father and his secret second family, and the relationships they have with each other. It’s a very tangled web, and I did draw a diagram as I was reading.
Farooki gives us chapters that focus on the characters’ experiences and their perspectives on the twisted relationships and confusing lies, and she occasionally shifts into first-person narration from Sharif’s perspective, and, for one chapter, into second-person from Ricky/Rashid. These chapters are interesting but interrupted the flow of the book rather than contributing to it, and I found them distracting and unnecessary.
The characters and their families are well-drawn and easily understood, and for a book about such a dark topic, Bitter Sweets is actually rather light and easy to read. Farooki asks some big questions about human nature and relationships, as when Shona considers that
Perhaps she had never learned to dissemble, to pretend, to play-act, as she knew she did so effectively; perhaps it had always been with her, part of her heritage from her duplicitous mother and bigamous father, and she had just needed to be exposed to the right stimuli to discover it for herself….Or was deception just another language she’d been taught, along with Urdu, Bangla, and English? Was it something that could be unlearned, or was it part of her?
As the story progresses, Farooki brings the characters to a series of revelatory moments and showdowns with each other, when their secrets are exposed, and they must prepare for the consequences of their deception. She sets a good pace and keeps the reader interested, as she forces us to wonder how it’s all going to go down. But the ending was ultimately very disappointing.
Up to the last 30 pages, I was ready to give Bitter Sweets 4 or 4.5 out of 5, but Farooki’s ending is anticlimactic, unrealistic, and too neat. If this had been a movie, the ending would have transformed it from a “thinker” to a chick flick, and I found it very frustrating that the ending robbed the book of some of its depth and made it a bit too fluffy. This was a very enjoyable read, but the ending basically ruined it for me, so I’m giving Bitter Sweets 3.5 out of 5.
Ooh, I’ve really had my eye on this one for awhile, so I’m glad you reviewed it positively! Although that is a disappointment about the ending!
That book looked promising to me. Sorry to hear it has such a disappointing ending.
You drew a diagram! I need to do that in the book I am reading now (The Fire – Katherine Neville).
I think I’ll still read this, even with the “heads up” about the ending. I felt similarly about *Guernica*, which I loved until near the end when I could see that the ends would tie together too neatly (unrealistic).
I kind of scares me that you needed a diagram to keep track of the characters. It sounds like an interesting book, though.
[...] my review of Farooki’s first novel Bitter [...]