Review of Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows #ReadBravely #ReadingChallenge2019

Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows is the fourth book that I read in January 2019. The first three books are Poonachi, The Girl on the Train and Norwegian Woods respectively. The title of this book intrigued me. I had also read a few reviews and most readers had praised it. This book was also picked up by Reese Witherspoon in her Reese’s Book Club. Honestly, I had great expectations from this book. However, when I started reading this book it felt more like an Ekta Kapoor mega soap opera where there are too many characters and the writer forgets what she/he was writing and the narrative goes all over the places. I had expected that this story would be about the widows however this story is not about them. This story is about a British-Punjabi girl called Nikki and how she solves the murder mystery of two Punjabi girls called Maya and Karina Kaur. The erotic stories of widows are thrown into this book exactly the way ‘item songs’ are thrown in Bollywood movies. The erotic stories are nothing poetic rather they are sexual fantasies of these middle-aged women that I found raunchy and titillating. These women are apparently shown getting empowered by talking about their sexual fantasies as if only way middle-aged women can get empowered is by talking about raunchy sex. Why would they want to come to a class only to talk about sex was beyond my understanding. The logic of this book is as logical as “Saans bhi kabhi bahu thi.”

The premise of the story had potential but the author was not able to exploit it to full potential. This story is the East meets West but it fails to talk about the Indian diaspora. If you have read Jhumpa Lahiri you would know how beautifully she had treated the East-West dilemma but this book deals the dilemma exactly the way Karan Johar deals in his movies. After the first 200 pages, the book became extremely boring and repetitive. The narrative was not moving forward and only new characters with little contribution to the storyline were getting added. In this book, the author tried to deal with a lot of issues that the diaspora population faces like xenophobia, immigrant status etc. It also talks about honor killing, arranged marriages, Izzat and everything that is associated. The author tried to deal with too many things in the scope of one book making it a bit hotch-potch. It could have been an excellent read if the focus would have been on the widows rather than a murder mystery. I would rate this book 2/5.

The prompts this book adheres to from #WriteTribeReadingChallenge2019 are

# Book written by a female author

# A book set in a country that you visited/want to visit

# A book recommended by a celebrity

# A book on crime-solving

# A book written by an author who is new to you

The prompts this book adheres to from #PopsugarReadingChallenge are

# A book you think should be turned into a movie (ideal masala film for Bollywood)

# A book recommended by a celebrity

# A book featuring an amateur detective (co-incidental rather than amateur)

# A book written by an author from Asia

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