Customer Reviews

Bitter Sweets

5 star:		(19)
4 star:		(48)
3 star:		(65)
2 star:		(23)
1 star:		(11)

 

 

Much is promised on the cover of this debut novel--a voice to join the likes of Lahiri and Roy-- but little is delivered. "Bitter Sweets" is a three generation saga about a Pakistani family that hides its tangled affairs from each other. The moral of the story is that deception is bad, but we hardly need this novel to explain that having two wives and families half a world apart could present some complications when all is discovered. Among the family's hidden secrets are infidelity, homosexuality, bigamy, parentage and age. It's hard to say more about the ridiculously silly plot without being a spoiler so I won't, in the unlikely event you decide to read this book.

Someone at St. Martin's must have decided it was time to jump on the ethnic-Muslim literary bandwagon, but be warned that this book has nothing at all to do with culture and heritage. The characters are shallow, and the writing quite clumsy. The narrator tells us what's happening rather than revealing it through the characters, and just in case we might miss something the author shifts disconcertingly into the first person without warning at a few key points. Chapter titles further drive the plot points home, along with giveaways like "he wasn't to know that, in twenty years or so, their little girl would meet. . . . .

An editor with a very sharp pencil would have helped, but the story lacks subtlety and texture. Can a daughter really forget forty years of a mother's neglect with a snap of the fingers? Is incest just a matter of bloodlines? Why do the adult children take their parents' breakup so calmly that one of them interrupts the story to ask if his beer is cold yet? These are ideas that could be explored, but they aren't in "Bitter Sweets."

I selected this because my intrigue with foreign culture. I prefer to be whisked somewhere into another land, another time, etc. Somehow that didn't happen.

Bitter Sweets begins with a family in India Henna was married at 12, and her husband Ricky Rashid believed her to be 17 and he discovers her lack of education and wealth. Soon, they have a daughter Shona. Ricky-Rashid gets a job in London, where much of the story takes place, meets a woman, and lives this "double-life". Shona also lives in London and meets a Pakistani and marries young too. She learns to cheat too and next thing you know, she had twins who form a rock band. The big secret emerges at the end, but it is hardly a mystery.

A novel needs characters that make you feel for them, whether you deeply care about, hate or associate with. Character development was lacking which makes it difficult in responding. In other words, I didn't care one bit about the characters, what they did, where they went, who they were. No one was memorable.

The theme involves deceptions and lies, and surprisingly, the lies were nothing unusual, just "cheating". Engage the reader into more aspects than just plain cheating.

The story is told through narration, but at one point, it became first person. In narrating the plot, each word should be important, and here, the text was bogged down with just words. And dialogue was uninteresting. I resented being led into numerous chapters about "teenagers" in a rock band. So, if not prepared, one can imagine subjected into "teen-age" dialogue.

As the story progressed, I felt the chapters disjointed, as if this section was plunked here, next to this section, throw in this section, put this here, etc. The development of the story was either slow or all of a sudden a life-changing element pops up.

Chapter titles were uninspiring. I don't want to be told what is to happen by reading a chapter title. I want to find that chapter title or decipher it within the text itself.

Author Roopa Farooki was brought up in England and this is her debut novel. ...Rizzo

"Bitter Sweets" tells the tangled story of three generations of a family from Bangladesh and Pakistan (and later, England) and how its members' secrets and lies eventually erupt.

It begins with a young woman who makes a brilliant marriage through trickery, then adds the tales of her daughter (who marries "down") and the daughter's twin sons. None of the characters here are particularly sympathetic ... mostly because of aforementioned secrets and lies. It's hard to root for a man who has wives on two continents, a woman who blackmails her father, and a manipulative teen.

That said, the book is a fast read, and it's fairly entertaining. But it tries to cover too much too quickly. None of the characters feel fully fleshed out (maybe they'd have been more likable if we'd understood more of their motivations), and the way the book jumps from one character to another got irritating quickly.

"Bitter Sweets" isn't an awful book; it just isn't a great one. It's the sort of book that would be fine to read on a plane or at the beach, but wouldn't find a permanent home on my bookshelf, by any means.

i know that Bitter Sweets may be Farooki's first novel. But i wasn't able to tell that with her way of bringing the reader into the lives of the different characters. Each one with so many secrets and lies to tell that it sometimes seemed that even they had a hard time getting them straight much less revealing them to the people that they loved cared about it.

Whether it was Shona or her non caring, materialistic mother or her husband (Ricky/Rashid). Who had more than a couple skeletons going on in his closet little does he know. Its not much of a secret back in his home land. Shona's kids (Omar/Sharif) with a few things of their own that they hid or are hidden from for awhile but when they do come to light, wow!! It kind of takes you for a loop.

Before i knew it Bitter Sweets had come to a close and while it may seem long to some. For me the book ended too quickly and i must say that i really enjoyed this one. I hope people don't pass this one off as a girlie story. Because i felt it was something that all of us can relate to. We all have some things that don't get told to others for fear of hurting others. But its those things that you dont tell that hurt them more in the long run than not telling them at all.

Bitter Sweets, fun and engaging characters, story and really solid first outing by Roopa Farooki.

The father is a bigamist. The mother is indifferent and rather prefers the company of her brother-in-law. The daughter, finding out about her father's English wife and child, blackmails him for money. Years later she will have an adulterous affair with a colleague--an Irishmen, several years younger--and now her father has something to hold over her. Meanwhile, one of her twin sons is infatuated with a gay college mate, while the other, an aspiring rock star, is unaware that the girl he's fallen in love with is his aunt.

Set between the Subcontinent and the British Isles, Roopa Farooki's BITTER SWEETS is a story about a Muslim Bengali family that is sustained much as it is tormented by its members' penchant for deception. It also addresses themes rarely seen in South Asian/Desi fiction: bigamy; the sexual independence (and recklessness) of a married Muslim woman; homosexuality and young South Asian men; incest (unwittingly committed, but incest nevertheless). BITTER SWEETS has the makings of a controversial bestseller. The problem is with its author.

Farooki squanders the opportunity to flesh out the subject matter she's raised. She chooses to avoid any meaningful confrontation that might clash with the novel's overall whimsical attitude. As Farooki follows one scandal with another, the story increasingly resembles the script of a soap opera, becoming tedious. Chapter after chapter, it's all a tease. By the time of the finale, which is so contrived it is a farce, there's a feeling of relief to be done with whole thing.

I simply hated this novel. My time is too precious for bunk like this. Why can't new novelists make families whole and imperfect -- rather than throwing in every bad cliché in the book? It took me the better part of six evenings to slog through this quagmire of deceit and predictable dysfunction. (I agree with the reviewer who compared Bitter Sweets to Desperate Housewives!)

Farooki's writing style is mind numbing. Every chapter opens the same way and all stories have the same cadence. Hit over the head again and again by endless -- and often meaningless -- descriptions -- I often had to close the book and recover. Due said mind-numbing, it took me a while to recognize the fact that Bitter Sweets' voice is very bad imitation of richly descriptive storytellers, like: Isaac Bashevis Singer, who also wrote about families, deception and history -- only he did it WELL.

I'm a writer and an avid reader. I love language. I love the nuances of language. Instead of being an enjoyable communion with words, reading Bitter Sweets is just time spent that I cannot get back.

I love Indian writing, and am an especially big fan of Arundhati Roy, so I was excited when the cover of Bitter Sweets compared the author, Roopa Farooki, with her, among other prominent Indian writers. The book did not live up to expectations, however.

Bitter Sweets is the story of a family of liars. The lies start with Henna Rub's father, a shopkeeper who elaborately orchestrates his 13-year-old daughter's marriage based completely on lies. The lies continue with her new husband, Ricky-Rashid, and filter down to their daughter, Shona, and Shona's children, Omar and Sharif, and encompass both minor and life-shattering things, among them adultery, illiteracy, and the characters' true selves. These lies build and build, until they collide to create a climax that threatens to tear the family apart.

The premise was very intriguing, but the style of storytelling, the characters, and the end result made this a mediocre novel. The narrative jumps around a lot, from character to character, time to time, and even voice to voice. I think this can sometimes work well, but in this case, it was just jarring and didn't allow the reader to know the characters very well or even find out details about the various events. For example, for a catalyst, very little time is spent on Henna's marriage to Ricky-Rashid other than to give a little background. The writing was also mediocre, as Farooki's novel was not what I expected - lush, vibrant, romantic, magical. Despite the drama and the complex web of emotions, it was all approached rather prosaically and superficially. The reader gets a description of characters and their emotions, but I never felt like I really understood or was involved with them. The ending was also a bit of a disappointment, as despite years and years of lies of the kind to destroy lives, all of the characters are unfazed and forgiving of each other's deceptions. It felt unrealistic and contrived, especially in regard to Henna.

I did find myself interested in the story and interested in the culmination of all of these lies, so I would concur with another reviewer who said the story deserved a 4 and the writing deserved a 2. I think some of Farooki's ticks will improve with practice, such as the shallowness of the narrative and the silly phrases, such as "henna-pecked" to describe Ricky-Rashid's home situation. I hope that future novels will have more depth and passion and won't skate over critical things like character development and the true consequences of characters' actions.

I did not like this novel, and I am not sure whether the fault lies with the author or the editor, or both of them. Some novels draw you into unrealistic plots and unbelievable events through sublime writing. However, when the writing is inept and amateurish, the reader is never engaged. Although I did ultimately finish this novel, it was a challenge. Annoying abbreviations, such as "FT," "CDG," and "PPE" (I know what they mean), are strewn throughout the novel, throwing off the reader's pace. And how did the author get away with the term "prawn thingies?" Did someone forget to correct the final draft? If these stumbling blocks are not sufficient to deter the reader, then there are many awkwardly worded passages, such as my favorite: "We fail at something at every stage in our development, every small success preceded by failure after failure. And sometimes followed by it, too. Each first faltering infant step preceded by flump after flumpy fall chest-first on the floor or, if you're lucky, into someone's arms." Strangely, these problems seem confined only to the first half of the novel, which leads me to think that there were two different editors, or perhaps the author concentrated more on the latter portion of the novel. The novel's back cover states that Farooki "adds a fresh voice to the company of Zadie Smith, Jhumpa Lahiri and Arundhati Roy" and therefore invites us to compare this novel with works by these authors. But "Bitter Sweet" suffers glaringly by comparison.

Some of the most interesting novels I have read have been centered on the immigrant experience, as well as the strains and pressures of bicultural (or even multicultural) identity. BITTER SWEETS struck me as that sort of book and I was eager to read the debut novel by Pakistani-British writer Roopa Farooki. My hope was that it would be on the same plane as marvelous books like THE NAMESAKE, written by Jhumpa Lahiri.

Unfortunately, my hopes were dashed. This was one of the most self-indulgent and contrived pieces of fiction I have read in a very long time. You know it's a bad sign when you've skimmed four pages of what should be very witty dialogue centered on conflict and you can't remember what you just read! Farooki throws in every contrived turn of phrase you can think of ["worlds colliding," etc.]. Centered on a blended [and very broken] Pakistani/Bangladeshi/British family, with numerous "deep, dark secrets" that are [rather badly] concealed. The secrets include drug addiction, incest, homosexuality and mutual extramarital affairs. Add into the mix vanity, vanity and more vanity. Roopa Farooki's characters are wooden and some of the dialogue is ridiculous (there is no other word to describe it). As much as I wanted to like this book, I can't say that I did. I advise you to skip this one.

Roopa Farooki's debut novel, "Bitter Sweets," is described on the cover as "enchanting and utterly addictive." Is that the smoking gun that proves no one at St. Martin's Press actually read the book? On the other hand, such hyperbole is compatible with the novel's theme of deception.

In a nutshell, the story concerns Henna Rub, an illiterate shopkeeper's daughter who lies about her age and identity to marry Ricky Rashid, the educated son of an affluent Catholic family. Lies are a family tradition, and lies continue to be the basis for the lives of the characters as we follow them through several decades. A daughter is conceived in one of Ricky's fumbling, bumbling attempts to consummate the marriage (one of the brief highlights of the novel), but Henna and Ricky have little in common, and before long, Ricky succumbs to deception himself, taking up with an English girl while still married to Henna.

Oh, what a tangled web we weave.

Unfortunately, the story itself is too tangled to keep straight, and Farooki's writing style is too matter of fact to generate much surprise or interest. The story reads more like a recitation of events than a novel. Some heavy-duty editing would have been helpful here, but even that might have failed to salvage it.

Brian W. Fairbanks