Our Take

Burnt Sugar is a ferocious debut that refuses easy answers about mother-daughter relationships. Avni Doshi's greatest achievement is creating a narrator who is deeply unsympathetic yet utterly compelling—Antara's rage at her mother is justified, but her cruelty toward the now-vulnerable Tara complicates any simple reading of victim and villain. The novel interrogates memory itself: how reliable are childhood recollections shaped by trauma? Is Tara's forgetting a medical condition or a convenient escape? Doshi never tells us definitively, forcing readers to sit with ambiguity. The prose is sharp and unsentimental, capturing both the sensory richness of India and the suffocating intimacy of this toxic relationship. What makes this book remarkable is how it dismantles the sanctity of motherhood without falling into misogyny—Tara is selfish and neglectful, but she's also a product of patriarchal expectations and her own traumas. The novel explores how women harm each other across generations, how narcissism masquerades as spirituality, and how impossible it is to untangle love from resentment when they've been braided together since childhood. Some readers find Antara too bitter, but that's precisely the point—Doshi isn't interested in likability. Fans of Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn or The Vegetarian by Han Kang will appreciate this unflinching examination of family dysfunction. Burnt Sugar is essential reading for anyone interested in complex portrayals of mothers, daughters, and the stories we tell ourselves to survive.