Reviews tagging 'Bullying'

Burnt Sugar by Avni Doshi

7 reviews

sparklesandcupcakes's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional mysterious reflective tense slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? No
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

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sha's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional reflective tense medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? No
  • Loveable characters? No
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.5

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laurataylor's review against another edition

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challenging dark sad slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? No
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.0

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____emily____'s review against another edition

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challenging reflective sad tense slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? No
  • Loveable characters? No
  • Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.75

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aaminak's review against another edition

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emotional slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? No
  • Loveable characters? No
  • Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

1.5

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nakutski's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional reflective slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

3.75

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katie_greenwinginmymouth's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional reflective medium-paced
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.5

Read this as part of Idle Readers book club shadowing The Booker Prize. It was definitely a good one for a book club discussion and opinion was pretty split on it. Personally I love an unreliable narrator and I thought the way it worked with the storyline and central themes about memory was really clever.

The story is told through Antara whose mother is apparently beginning to show signs of early onset dementia. This causes problems in the already fraught relationship between mother and daughter and the book explores what it means to have to care for someone whose previous lack of care for you makes this particularly challenging.

But it’s exactly this difficult history that the two have that puts a huge question mark over the nature of Antara’s mother’s illness and we begin to wonder whether Antara’s assertion that her mother is unwell is in fact a way of her exerting control over her and is therefore another manifestation of the constant fight for power between the two women. There is a particularly striking moment when Antara has changed her mother’s diet to help with her brain health but then when her mother remembers a particularly inconvenient truth that Antara was trying to keep hidden she immediately switches her mother back onto the high sugar diet that keeps her foggy and docile.

The themes of memory and it’s mutability are brilliantly examined throughout and I was really struck by something a therapist says to Antara about how “reality is something that is co-authored.” Antara has a tendency to withhold important information from others which deliberately alters the version of reality others are able to access and puts different people’s memories of events in conflict with each other. The way this affects her relationship with her husband is hard to stomach but all too familiar. In a way the reader is put in the same position as her mother, details are withheld from us and we have to piece together reality from these fragmented memories.
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