An interesting story, but slightly awkward execution. 

I’d never heard of Mai Bhago before, and I know almost nothing about Sikh history, so from that perspective this was a really interesting story – I loved all the historical and cultural details about rural life in pre-colonial India, which the author has clearly researched a lot. 

However, the writing was fairly clunky and didn’t always flow very smoothly: despite the amount of death and grief in the story, I struggled to feel much emotion towards any of the characters (except for in one particular memorable scene).  I also found the way Punjabi words and phrases were incorporated to feel slightly awkward: they were often just dropped into the text in a way that felt unnatural (‘Your salwar-kameez is soni’), or translated immediately, disrupting the flow of the narrative ('wildflowers… flashing petals brighter than a deeva, a lamp'). 

Mai Bhago herself also wasn’t my favourite, and I wonder if I might have got on a bit better with the book if it hadn’t been in first person. Her character seemed simultaneously somewhat inconsistent, with her changing her position on certain things seemingly from page to page, but also quite flat – she doesn’t develop much, and I honestly couldn’t tell how old she was supposed to be by the end. I also didn’t love the aggressive ‘not like other girls’ overtones in the first half: though that message is slightly softened by the end, particularly after Mai Bhago gets married herself, she never really makes an effort to understand the positions of the women around her who do want to get married and who value beauty/enjoy cooking and sewing/etc.