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Girls Burn Brighter

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Girls Burn Brighter

By: Shobha Rao
Narrated by: Soneela Nankani
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'A treat for Ferrante fans, exploring the bonds of friendship and how female ambition beats against the strictures of poverty and patriarchal societies'
Huffington Post

An electrifying debut novel - the story of the unbreakable bond between two girls driven apart, and their journeys across continents to find each other again.

Poornima and Savitha, born in poverty, have known little kindness in their lives until they meet as teenagers. When an act of devastating cruelty drives Savitha away, Poornima leaves behind everything she has ever known to find her friend.

Alternating between the girls' perspectives as they face apparently insurmountable obstacles on their travels through the darkest corners of India's underworld and across an ocean, Girls Burn Brighter introduces two heroines who refuse to lose the hope that burns within.©2018 Shobha Rao Fiction Genre Fiction Literary Fiction
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Critic reviews

'Girls Burn Brighter by Shobha Rao blew my heart up. Heart-shards everywhere. I am in awe of the warmth and humanity in this book, even as it explores some incredibly dark places. I'm going to be thinking about Girls Burn Brighter for a while, and you're going to be hearing a lot about it' (Charlie Jane Anders, author of All the Birds in the Sky)
Burns with intensity . . . [Rao] is clearly a writer of great ambition
A searing portrait of what feminism looks like in much of the world
Shobha Rao writes cleanly and eloquently about women who, without their brightness, might have been left to die in their beds. She writes them into life, into existence, into the light of day
Rao evokes the landscape of poverty with great skill . . . this is a timely portrayal of human traffi cking, cultural misogyny and the battles still fought every day by millions of women worldwide (Hannah Beckerman)
Elegant and eloquent . . . this emotionally devastating story is at times almost too harrowing to read (Eithne Farry)
All stars
Most relevant
This book was so grim. Felt drained and sad after reading it. Kept hoping something good would happen but it never did.

Utterly depressing and sad

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Beautiful written almost poetic at times, with a childish innocence to it.

However the content is not childish, it is brutish, raw and shocking, explaining the the lives of the two Indian girls Poornima and Savitha as they become friends and then part company due to circumstances.(No spoilers)

My only criticism is the ending was very weak when it had packed such a powerful punch throughout the book,

Narration was excellent, delivered at times with almost a tear in the narrators voice.

The horrors of being a poor Indian girl

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The reader sounds pained throughout. It’s a difficult story, sure, but hearing just one emotion solidly - especially when describing food (which is at least 30% of the story and is a problem in itself) and becomes unbeatably irritating. You go through some really dark stories and I don’t feel like there’s sufficient return for that. It feels like there’s a whole missing section. Hearing a man we don’t know tell a story about people we don’t know, for ages when the protagonist can’t even understand the language he’s talking in was just frustrating. The whole story is so laboured that what i found out took place over four year - I was certain was about 15. Too much description, too meandering and nothing of what I wanted to hear about at the end. A real shame and a bit of a waste.

Should be great but meanders and labours unnecessarily painfully

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