This book starts off with the most intriguing hook I think I’ve ever read in a book, “I would be lying if I said my mother’s misery has never given me pleasure”. This truly sets up the entire plot of the book. We are introduced to Antara, the daughter of Tara. She comes off as very pessimistic and very unsure of herself as she struggles to really find her way as an artist. Her mother is currently showing symptoms of memory loss which, reasonably, scares Antara. However, doctors and even some other family members don’t seem as worked up about Tara’s health as Antara does leading me to believe that either the doctors in this town are incompetent or Antara is misconstruing events.

A key point of this book has been the contentious nature of Tara and Antara’s relationship. The first thing to note is how similar their names are which I don’t doubt will eventually be remarked on. Also, we learn later that when Tara became pregnant with Antara she continued her bad habits of smoking and drinking and then proceeded to join an ashram (cult?) while Antara was little. Here, Antara was subjected to a lot of abuse in different forms. After her mother becomes infatuated with the leader, she rarely sees her and is put in the care of Kali Mata (a white woman looking to find herself) who also struggles to really take care of Antara. She refuses to eat or sleep, and when she does sleep she has violent nightmares that cause her to physically harm herself. That in addition to her mother also hitting her just gives her an already troubled background and we still don’t know a lot about what happens when they leave the ashram.

One thing I found interesting is even though Antara claims not to like her mother she not only seeks Tara’s approval, as most kids do from their parents, but she has almost emulated all of Tara’s life choices. Antara is an artist who has married a wealthy man. While Tara left her arranged marriage with a wealthy man (Antara’s dad) and sought out an artist later in her life. I’m not sure if this is significant or even if it’s purposeful, but there are a lot of instances where Antara mirrors her mother and if this is kept up throughout the book I think it’ll be a really interesting motif to look out for.

Things I Liked:

• the mirroring motif
• the cover of the book
• the prose style of writing

Things I Did Not Like:

• the jumping back and forth for right now. I think with time it will be less disjointing, but as of now it’s kind of hard to keep track of everything
• Dillip. He hasn’t done anything that I can really be suspicious of, but I am suspicious of him