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Bitter Sweets | 
 enlarge | Author: Roopa Farooki
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Category: Book
List Price: $24.95
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Rating:  154 reviews
Sales Rank: 226745
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 368
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.4
Dimensions (in): 9.3 x 6.2 x 1.5
ISBN: 0312360525
Dewey Decimal Number: 823.92
EAN: 9780312360528
ASIN: 0312360525
Publication Date: November 13, 2007
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Product Description
With this spellbinding first novel about the destructive lies three immigrant generations of a Pakistani/Bangladeshi family tell each other, Roopa Farooki adds a fresh new voice to the company of Zadie Smith, Jhumpa Lahiri and Arudhati Roy. Henna Rub is a precocious teenager whose wheeler-dealer father never misses a business opportunity and whose sumptuous Calcutta marriage to wealthy romantic Ricky-Rashid Karim is achieved by an audacious network of lies. Ricky will learn the truth about his seductive bride, but the way is already paved for a future of double lives and deception--family traits that will filter naturally through the generations, forming an instinctive and unspoken tradition. Even as a child, their daughter Shona, herself conceived on a lie and born in a liar's house, finds telling fibs as easy as ABC. But years later, living above a sweatshop in South London's Tooting Bec, it is Shona who is forced to discover unspeakable truths about her loved ones and come to terms with what superficially holds her family together--and also keeps them apart--across geographical, emotional and cultural distance. Roopa Farooki has crafted an intelligent, engrossing and emotionally powerful Indian family saga that will stay with you long after you've read the last page.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 149 more reviews...
 Ouch! August 28, 2007
J. Marren (Glen Ridge, NJ USA)
23 out of 31 found this review helpful
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."
THE LIES THAT BIND October 3, 2007
Bookworm (St. George Utah)
20 out of 20 found this review helpful
Bitter Sweets was obviously chosen as the title of this book as a reference to the sweet shop owned by two of the characters in her novel as well as a metaphor for their lives. Bittersweet, however, is also another name for the nightshade plant....the misuse of which can produce potentially lethal results. Lies and deception too, can produce lethal results. Lies can kill love, and deception deftly strangles the truth.
This is a novel of cultural heritage and the destructive lies that cross three generations of a Pakistani family. It begins with Henna Rub, illiterate shopkeeper's daughter, who manages to con wealthy Ricky-Rashid into marriage by convincing him that she is his educated, well read, tennis playing soul mate. They tolerate their loveless marriage and produce a daughter, Shona. She is a hopeless romantic like her father as well as an adept liar, like her mother, and even at an early age finds telling "fibs" as easy as falling off a log.
Shona finds Parvez, the man of her dreams at the age of 10. Years later they elope and start a new life above a sweet shop in south London's Tooting Bec. Two decades later, with her own children grown, Shona is forces to confront the tangled vine of lies choking the life out of her family.
The language in this book is a little stilted, and the resolution to the story bit too tidy and "happily ever after" to be realistic. I don't believe that most people, (especially this group of people) would react as the author would like us to believe. Overall, this Indian saga is not a bad first attempt. A little more diligence by her editor could have made it a much better book. 2 1/2 Stars
 Bogged Sloggingly by Voluptuously Unnecessary Adverbs August 29, 2007
Debbie Lee Wesselmann (the Lehigh Valley, PA)
16 out of 22 found this review helpful
I opened Roopa Farooki's debut novel with anticipation. As a reader of global fiction, I could not wait to sit down with this newest Asian Indian voice and her story. Within pages, I was mired in bad writing, the kind of stuff professors of creative writing edit out of their students' work before a story reaches the second draft. Despite this torture, I continued reading with the hope that I would find something redeeming in this stilted family saga.
The story itself is not bad: thirteen year old Henna and her conniving father trick a wealthy family into believing that Henna is more literate and cultured than she is. Her new husband, Ricky/Rashid, discovers on their wedding night that his bride is not the seventeen year old he had expected but instead is a child, off-limits sexually and, we learn, emotionally. The book follows the lives of these characters, their children, and their grandchildren. Farooki tells each story from a different point-of-view, allowing her to delve into the more intimate interior lives of her characters. About halfway through the book, the pace picks up, and the writing sheds some, but not all, of its heavy-handed style. Some of the characters begin to flesh out; for example, a scene between Henna's daughter Shona and her supervisor in the faculty lounge is vivid and well-imagined.
Ultimately, however, the writing defines this book, and it borders on the insufferable. Farooki needed a good editor to teach her the art of revision. She jettisons the art of showing for the more tedious style of telling, naming emotions instead of giving them life, explaining motivations instead of trusting the reader to figure them out. She weighs down her dialogue tags with adverbs and old-fashioned inversions. Her descriptions are rarely memorable. Unfortunately, any page of this novel would be at home in Jack Pendarvis's send-up of amateurish writing, The Mysterious Secret of the Valuable Treasure.
The publisher compares Farooki to Zadie Smith (White Teeth: A Novel), Jhumpa Lahiri (The Namesake: A Novel), and Arundhati Roy (The God of Small Things), but she has none of Smith's biting irony, Lahiri's characterization, or Roy's lyricism. Four stars for the story, two stars for the writing.
 (4.5 stars) What a tangeled web we weave when first we practice to deceive ... August 23, 2007
Lilly Flora (Portland, OR)
15 out of 19 found this review helpful
Have you ever said something to someone and they didn't hear you, and no matter how important what you had to say was you don't repeat yourself and just say "never mind"? Or lied because you didn't want to hurt someone's feelings and deal with the fallout, or kept a really big secret? I have, we all have. And that is what this smart, funny and touching book is about, the deception that goes in families.
Sure it is more pronounced in this family. At the beginning, in Bangladesh where we start out Henna and her father lie to the wealthy family of Ricky-Rashid Karim and say the 13 year old uneducated, illiterate girl is 17 and can speak and read English, and this lie allows her to marry Ricky and be prosperous. Later their daughter Shona while lie about her Pakistani boyfriend, who she elopes to London with. Their twin boys will deceive and be deceived and Ricky-Rashid will get involved in some pretty heavy deception of his own. This is a book about a family who is so used to deceit that it begins to rule, and ruin their lives. It's about the lies they tell each other, as well as the wool they pull over their eyes to deceive themselves.
"Bitter Sweets" is a very human story, and though exaggerated to almost soap-opera proportions with the plot-line this doesn't hurt the story, it just makes for a more satisfying ending. Also it's extremely well written. Though mostly in third person there are small parts in both first and second (which is rarely seen and very well used here.) Even though this is her first novel Roopa Farooki is obviously very creative and has a practiced hand at storytelling in new ways. In particular there is one scene where the breakdown of a marriage is shown and argued our between a wife and the imaginary husband in her head as she looks at pictures of them and sees how they each let things fall apart. The author reminds me of Marine Keyes and Jane Green at their best-smart intelligently written fiction that does fit into chick lit but can be respected as well.
I liked this book a lot more than I expected to, and I feel safe in recommending it and saying you shouldn't overlook this novel because it has some beach-read elements. It also has some deep truths and some very relatable subject matter-even if you didn't deceive anyone in the particular ways this family did you have in your life deceived someone. And if you're like most people, you also know the joy of finally coming clean.
Four point five stars.
A Tease November 6, 2007
Caesar M. Warrington (Lansdowne, PA United States)
13 out of 13 found this review helpful
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.
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