I just don't know what the author was trying to get at within this book, because clearly we were supposed to feel compassion for the characters, but all I feel is indifference.

Our unnamed and heartbreakingly relatable protagonist skkkrt-ed through school and it’s webs of appearance guilt, before escaping to the big city of LDN for “new beginnings”. Obs menar inte att förminska en ätstörning men den skrivs fram som ett litet sidospår utan att på riktigt bemötas eller verka ha några konsekvenser. The background is the Mumbai of late 90s and initially it begins on a seemingly light-hearted note but eventually I found myself reading about the intensity of human emotions intertwined with the essence of Mumbai( talked about through various events and things that define the city). I think what I mean is, there were certain passages that felt slight too navel gazing and, dare I say it, overly written?Concerned as it is with want and hunger, in all manifestations, each part of this novel represents the whole.

And listen, you're not going to get any points for lgbtq representation if your lgbtq character is a misogynistic creeper. It is a character-driven novel with most of it tracing the evolution of Ira and Kartik from children to adults, and sculpting the personalities of their families, their neighbours, and Kaiz. Ira is 28, an age that’s tipping over the marriageable limit for girls in most Indian communities while Kartik is 30 and unmarried too.The nostalgia aspect of it was reflected in flashbacks of when Ira and Karthik as kids are running around and playing games like mosquito cricket, climbing up water tanks and studying for the 'Indian epidemic of board exams'. Recommended for everyone, but especially to those who've grown up in Mumbai to renew an acquaintance with pre-cell-phone city preserved now only by nostalgia and photographs.

Unfortunately, rather than casting off her irritating writing style, she appears to have really doubled down on it. This is because, unlike her own, ‘their needs were thoughtless because they had the means to meet them. I am not the kind of person who lets myself curl up softly in the folds of someone else, but you took my mottled shell in your gentle fingers and I slid out, wanting. Amrita Mahale once enquired on her blog: “Can you use up a lifetime’s supply of luck in three months? Loved the way she makes the city a central character in her book, embracing it with all its fears, hopes, prejudices, smells (do read her take on the smell of the sea), its chaos and the constant struggle to find one’s own voice within it.To be honest, I didn't even read the whole extract - I read a part of it, liked it so much and thought to myself - this is a book I'm going to read in its entirety anyway, so why 'spoil it'. Also what happens in the in-between years forms the meat of the story and that is what lends the story its heft. Our heroine does have a messy life - don't we all - but it's presented here in a way that sees truth pouring off every page. The book captures Mumbai in all its glory and gloom with the situations that governed the city during those times. Their terrain is dry and burning and Edith and their neighbours cling to memories of what once was: snow and rain, green grass and trees ripe with fruit.