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sleightoffeet's review
3.0
At first I had some trouble reading this book. Not because of the subject matter, though it is difficult and trigger warnings abound, but the prevalence phonetic spelling was hard to understand at first. However, as I got to know the people involved, the spelling really gave me the flavor of their accents and I became more comfortable with it and understood it more.
This is a book about the bar dancers in Bombay. Not one of these girls had a happy life. The amount of abuse they suffered from the time they were born is unimaginable. The profession of "bar dancer" is looked upon as the best they could hope for in their lives. The reader gets a peak inside this life, how they got there, and where they might go when their done (which sounds a lot more optimistic than it is.)
Though in her acknowledgments, she says she changed a lot of the people's names for their privacy, but I am left curious if Leela and Priya were real, or represented many of the girls, and if they were real, what became of them. By the end, I had gotten emotionally attached to them and felt the author had as well, though in this line of work, if they were real, we may never know.
As horrifying as many of the details of their world were, it's easy to look at them as a nameless faceless group, but many forget (especially in the upper castes and government) that they are people each with their own stories.
This is a book about the bar dancers in Bombay. Not one of these girls had a happy life. The amount of abuse they suffered from the time they were born is unimaginable. The profession of "bar dancer" is looked upon as the best they could hope for in their lives. The reader gets a peak inside this life, how they got there, and where they might go when their done (which sounds a lot more optimistic than it is.)
Though in her acknowledgments, she says she changed a lot of the people's names for their privacy, but I am left curious if Leela and Priya were real, or represented many of the girls, and if they were real, what became of them. By the end, I had gotten emotionally attached to them and felt the author had as well, though in this line of work, if they were real, we may never know.
As horrifying as many of the details of their world were, it's easy to look at them as a nameless faceless group, but many forget (especially in the upper castes and government) that they are people each with their own stories.
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