Author: Meena Kandasamy
Published: 2017
Language: English
Pages: 272
Rating: 5/5
Summary:
An unnamed narrator, seduced by poetry and politics, falls in love with a university professor and agrees to marry him, and in their marriage, finds herself living with an abusive and controlling husband.
Review:
This was brutal.
Reading about this kind of topic is always going to be heartbreaking, but this book brings it to another level. There's something about the writing style that makes this book so incredibly staggering. We all know that these things happen, but it's still shocking and horrendous to read about.
I think this book does a really good job of capturing the cycle of abuse and the insides of the mind of the victim. It captures the shame, the fight, the reason why one might stay and most horrifying; how one could kind of get used to it and what one will do to survive. However, it doesn't glorify anything for a single second or blame anyone else than the abuser, which you would think is obvious, but these thoughts sometimes slips into our literature.
It's a frustrating book to read in a lot of ways and every time I read a male character tell the female protagonist that "her feminism was getting in the way of herself," I wanted to rip this book to shreds. The sad part of reading those kinds of characters is knowing that they exist in real life.
This is raw, honest, explosive and moving. It's unflinching in its portrayal of domestic violence and everything that comes with living inside that kind of home.
You can read more about it on Goodreads
