Bitter Sweets

I've talked about Roopa Farooki's first novel before. I was initially intrigued by the first few pages of the novel and even went so far as to transcribe them for my post. Here's my review of it for Amazon. It's not good:

I was excited to begin reading this book after I visited Roopa Farooki's website and read a sample from the first chapter. This was a beginning with a hook: intrigue carefully cultivated and well-narrated. I mean, how many times do you get to read about a web of carefully-crafted fabrications resulting in the marriage of a 13-year-old precocious, spoiled girl from a lower-strata family in class-conscious India to an Oxford-educated man from the country's highest echelons? Not many, I wager.

When I finally did receive the book, I wasn't disappointed—for the first dozen or so chapters anyway. In that many chapters, the girl becomes a self-centered woman, scheming every step of the way. The man becomes a languid, boring Eeyore of a person, depressed at the way his life turned out. A daughter with the same gift of lying as her mother is born to them; abortions happen; university attended; love fallen into by the daughter with a Less-Than-Desirable followed by an elopement to Tooting, a London suburb where twins are born after some fertility treatments funded by the blackmailing of the father; father meets up with some silly woman and marries in secret with an eventually secret baby, giving daughter blackmailing material.

If the last sentence is a bit nonsensical and rushed, then I have hopefully conveyed the whirlwind-like pacing the author launches into after that first, intriguing chapter. I felt like I was in a runaway locomotive with so many events occurring almost simultaneously. In the blink of an eye, twenty years pass, and Things Change, somewhat illogically. The author pronounces certain things and expects the reader to accept them at face value, when the build-up to the pronouncements contains nothing to support those pronouncements. In other words, there are some major lapses in the logical progression that felt very wrong to me as I read along.
In the end, I did not care anymore. There were too many leaps in the story line that the characters (and the pacing of their introduction) led me to dislike them and I knew I couldn't continue. The drama was gone and along with it any desire to find out what happens to these people. I stopped near the middle, just after the rock-playing twins turned 15 (I think, whatever).

The book is well-written, technically. The author has a sure grip on constructing the story, her turns of phrase are great, even wonderful, but like the first-time author she is, what she has metaphorically constructed is a house one can live in and be protected against the elements but nothing beyond that: no joy of architecture that turns a house into a home, no beauty, just competency. This wasn't for me, alas.

Too bad, I really wanted to like this book.