The Bandit Queens (2023) by Parini Schroff was a recent book group pick that I was planning to read anyway. While I am glad that I read it, I have very mixed feelings about it. The premise intrigued me–Geeta is an outcast because her remote Indian village believes that she made herself a widow by killing her abusive husband in some way. The truth is that he was a drunk and left her, but she’s too embarrassed to tell the truth. When some of the other women in her micro-loan group approach her to help them make themselves widows, things quickly spiral out of control.
My initial problem was the anti-fat bias that was peppered throughout–primarily about Saloni, Geeta’s former best friend since they were children, now the “mean girl” in the micro-loan group. Saloni had been beautiful as a young woman, but very poor and hungry all of the time. Although she made a good marriage to a kind man, and is now better off than many, she gained weight when having her children and others now make anti-fat comments to and about her.
As the story proceeded, my other problem was the language that the author chose to use. It’s set in a remote Indian village–where Geeta’s financial goal is to save enough money to afford a refrigerator–but the characters use American slang and many seem to watch crime shows. Those things brought me out of the story and just didn’t seem to fit.
Other than the anti-fat bias, I loved the banter between the women, and the friendship redemption arc between Geeta and Saloni, and the black humor. The topics were bleak–spousal abuse and subsequent murder, child rape, the caste system, and the patriarchy in general–but I think the author did a good job of handling them sensitively.
I loved the recurring joke about motherhood being “so rewarding” whenever someone complained about their children, and how Geeta’s listening to nature radio shows and the sisterhood of bonobo monkeys made multiple appearances.
While I do recommend it, my recommendation is with reservations because of the significant and pervasive anti-fat bias.
