A Burning

Would not recommend this book. It is riddled with stereotypes and misrepresentations. The writing style was weird as well, nobody in India who is learning English speaks the way Lovely does. It sounds just like the cliched Indian character from an American sitcom. So many aspects of this have made me angry. It's the Slumdog Millionaire of books IMO.

4.5
(I listen to this book)
Lovely makes this story perfect. Megha created a beautiful story in which all the characters mix in between, and get us to know how dreams and expectations are a common game between individual and community. I could feel the hope (and hopelessness) of each character. The audiobook version is narrated by different authors, making it involving and dynamic.

Incredibly propulsive and masterfully crafted, always puts you right into the moment, right into the heads of three people in modern-day India, whose lives are loosely tied together around a tragedy, and who resemble each other in their quest and passion to escape their socioeconomical and cultural circumstances.

A very scary portrait of India with its caste-system, religious discrimination, political corruption, exploitation of dreams, and yet we encounter in it people full of hope. This worked really well as an audiobook.

If there exists a love letter to India, this would be the opposite. A Burning follows 3 characters whose lives are intertwined, dealing with the grittiest and worst aspects of Indian society.

There are extremely gripping and harrowing events in this book that leave you pitying the characters instead of rooting for them. All three characters aim to work their way up in social class, only to be battered down again and again by the system if they don't get extremely lucky or cheat it somehow.

I acclimated to the writing style, and the use of different tenses helped separate the voices of the 3 narrators. However, the writing style didn't lend itself well to the story or help me envision the characters better. It just ends up being a bit annoying to read, and limits the nuance of each character.

Overall, it was an entertaining (albeit horrifying) read that paints the Indian government and society in a single dark stroke.

I struggled with the pacing of this. It's sharp and loud and unapologetic about its political theming, but I found some chapters so much stronger than others that it slowed my progress. I thought Lovely and Jivan had stronget voices than PT Sir, and Lovely had movement in her chapters that the other two didn't.

Part of me feels that I would feel differently if I could better see the characters as metaphors for communities rather than standalone personas, but alas.