32 of 38 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Ouch!, August 28, 2007
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
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."
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10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Secrets, lies, deception....so what???, August 23, 2007
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
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
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Fun for the beach ... but lacks real depth, August 19, 2007
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
"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.
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