A Scandalous Secret: BooklyBox

A Scandalous Secret

Jaishree Misra

 

  

This month's Adult Fiction book from BooklyBox was A Scandalous Secret b Jaishree Misra. It's no surprise to me that I didn't really enjoy it based on the summary and the title I just didn't think this would be my cup of tea (haha English reference). The story was about a girl, Sonya, who lives in England with her adoptive parents and decides to take a trip to India to meet her birth mother, Neha, in order to find out why she had given her up 17 years ago.

 

I can't really pin down the narration, it's like it's supposed to be third person but bounces in between different characters' perspectives. The only real problem I had with this is that I never knew who I was reading from when starting a chapter until I read a little bit to find out who's voice I was supposed to be reading through. There were plenty of characters in this book, including Sonya and her best friend Estella, her kind of boyfriend that she's known forever, Tim, and her adoptive parents. Once in India, there's Neha, her husband Sharat, and a boy that Sonya and Stel meet Keshav.

I couldn't say that I enjoyed any of the characters. The first thing that set me off on this book is that the author referred to two of her characters as 'OCD' (like it's some sort of attribute instead of a mental disorder) which is a common mistake, but one that irks me. Just because they are neat or orderly, they don't have any obsessive qualities and certainly haven't been diagnosed with the disorder... people, please stop fantasizing mental illness. Moving on, I really hated Sonya. She was an immature spoiled brat who thinks that she's owed an explanation from her birth mother to the point that she sends her a very nasty letter stating that she will show up at her house and demands to have a meeting with her. I will never know the struggle of being adopted, and I'm sure there's plenty of emotions and thoughts running through Sonya as to why her mother gave her up, but she didn't consider any realistic possibilities that her mother is a PERSON just like her, not some horrible woman who gave her up without even thinking about it (which is how she makes it seem). How can you force someone to meet with you? Pretty sure that Neha has her own free will and can turn down the meeting if she wants to.

And then there's Neha, who would rather commit suicide than tell anyone she had a daughter, apparently (although she never goes through with it because she 'can't find a sharp object').

 Everything about this book was melodramatic, and I felt like it was about 150 pages too long. The first half of the book repeated the same things continuously.

Sonya: I'm gonna meet this bitch and get an explanation. How could she just give me away without caring?

Neha: NO ONE CAN KNOW IT WILL DESTROY MY LIFE.

I'm sure there are plenty of books on people finding their biological parents that have been written better, but this one just was not for me.