My Goodreads and Amazon review of Burnt Sugar by Avni Doshi (Rating 3) – Neither Acrid Nor Sweet Enough. I was frankly disappointed by Avni Doshi’s acclaimed novel Burnt Sugar. Her portrait of an artistic daughter’s abuse by her mother, now suffering from dementia, echoes too many others to offer a fresh perspective. As a visual artist, I hoped Doshi would describe the creative process of her protagonist, Antara, and render her drawings vividly enough for me to picture them. She does neither. As a writer (see my Amazon author page and Goodreads author page), I looked for finely observed details about the setting, fully developed characters, and revelatory interactions. While Doshi’s cultural commentary is intriguing, especially on the differences between the narrator’s Indian-born upbringing and her husband’s American-born Indian background, much of this rich territory goes unexplored. Nor did her images of Pune today, and the ashram where Antara and her mother lived during Antara’s childhood, provide the depth I wanted. The main drawback was that I wasn’t invested in the characters; ergo Antara’s secret and postpartum meltdown did not elicit much reaction. Burnt Sugar is neither acrid nor sweet enough to deliver a shiver of surprise nor the satisfaction of inevitability.
