Enter to Win an Advanced Reading Copy of Girls Burn Brighter by Shobha Rao
When Poornima first meets Savitha, she feels something she thought she lost for good when her mother died: hope. Poornima's father hires Savitha to work one of their sari looms, and the two girls are quickly drawn to one another. Savitha is even more impoverished than Poornima, but she is full of passion and energy. She shows Poornima how to find beauty in a bolt of indigo cloth, a bowl of yogurt rice and bananas, the warmth of friendship. Suddenly their Indian village doesn't feel quite so claustrophobic, and Poornima begins to imagine a life beyond the arranged marriage her father is desperate to lock down for her.
But when a devastating act of cruelty drives Savitha away, Poornima leaves behind everything she has ever known to find her friend again. Her journey takes her into the darkest corners of India's underworld, on a harrowing cross-continental journey, and eventually to an apartment complex in Seattle. Alternating between the girls’ perspectives as they face relentless obstacles, Girls Burn Brighter introduces two heroines who never lose the hope that burns within them.
“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.”
—Charlie Jane Anders, author of All the Birds in the Sky
“There is a powerful, subtly unarticulated, force of nature drive at the heart of Shobha Rao’s blazing, beautiful novel. Beautiful in spite of much harm and horror, much of the worst kinds of abuse: the young women in this book do live for something larger, they struggle to survive, to live, to seek, and they do."—Rick Simonson, Elliott Bay Book Company
“It begins as a simple friendship between two girls, Poorima and Savitha, in India. With the artful prose of Shobha Roa, Girls Burn Brighter quickly develops into a totally absorbing story of love and separation…Its ending will awe, surprise, and dare I say, delight everyone. This is a book that will be remembered for a long time.”
—Nancy Simpson-Brice, Book Vault, Oskaloosa, IA
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