Beastmomma

I am very slow with completing books during this LAST year of law school while I am in the midst of wedding planning and daydreaming about making my life in a new state and figuring out how to find and create my dream job, so I thought that it would be fun to have a progress report of my reading. This is an online reading group where all the participants set aside time to read every Sunday and blog about the experience.

This morning, I think that I put down all the people I could possibly want to invite to the wedding and realized that I need to do a lot of cutting.  It is very exhausting and headache inducing.  Fortunately, I had a good book waiting to take me away from all that stress.  I read a bit of What the Body Remembers by Shauna Singh Baldwin.  A few years ago for my birthday, my cousin gave me this book.  She said, "I never read books, but this one kept my attention the whole time."  I took this as a big recommendation.  I kept putting off reading the book and then finally took it off the shelf and into my hands.  I can tell that I am going to enjoy the book even though I have only read about thirty pages.  Here is a brief summary of the book from the publisher's website:

The year is 1937, and Roop, a sixteen-year-old Sikh girl from a small village in Northwestern India, has just been married to Sardarji, a wealthy man in his forties. She is a second wife, married without a dowry in the hope that she will bear children, because Sardarji’s first wife, Satya, a proud, beautiful, combative woman whom he deeply loves, is childless. The wedding has been conducted in haste, and kept secret from Satya until after the fact. Angered and insulted, she does little to disguise her hatred of Roop, and secretly plans to be rid of her after she has served her purpose and given Sardarji a son.

The main two families in the book are Sikh and since I was raised in a Sikh household and still considered myself a cultural Sikh, I am enjoying getting the history of the religion and history about the merging and separation of the Sikh and Hindu cultural customs in India.   While the book is VERY long, I appreciate that there are many chapter breaks which makes the book easy to put down and pick up again.  Since there is at least one wedding that will take place in the book, I am also hoping to learn more about the significance of some of the wedding rituals that I will be participating in during my own wedding.   So far, the story has been told from the perspective of two women and both have made me sympathetic to their plight. I think this bodes well for the author's writing style.

I am reading this book for two challenges:

Chunkster Challenge

Orbis Teeravm Challenge