The heart wants what the heart wants, and our hearts want books.

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As we’ve been talking about our next Virtual Book Club pick, I’ve been thinking about all the things I do overthink, and some of the things I don’t.  One thing I don’t usually overthink is what my children read.  They’re reading high level, low content titles, so I do have to be mindful of that on occasion, but in general, they read their assigned books and whatever interests them from the library or home shelves.  Yes, this does mean my then eight year old started A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens and it lived in his bedside stack for about a week before he gave it up.  However, when I was reading with (as in next to) my (now) nine year old before bed last week, he saw me open my kindle book and said “mom, can I read er-o-tic stories?”  “Ah, no, no you may not dear.  It’s for adults, not nine year olds.”  Y’all!  The struggle is real!  And then I said a quick prayer for him not to ask what erotic means.  So far so good, but you never know when it’ll pop up again!  If you’d like an update of if my child has asked me to define erotic, please join us on Friday, March 26th at 7:30 p.m. CST when we’ll discuss Don’t Overthink It: Make Easier Decisions, Stop Second-Guessing, and Bring More Joy To Your Life by Anne Bogel and maybe the perils of living your best reading life around little people (and maybe I’ll tell you the story of my Adam’s reaction to glancing at this post over my shoulder as I was drafting it…he just saw the title).  Just don’t forget to sign up here to get the details on joining the conversation.

My memory tells me Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows by Balli Kaur Jaswal was everywhere when it first came out in 2017, or maybe it was when it was selected to be a part of Reese’s Book Club in March 2018.  Either way, when I saw it was a part of Prime Reading in September, I borrowed it superfast and shoulded on Ashley to do the same!  Yes, we’re slow to get around to reading books with no deadline, we know, but we get there eventually!  The only thing I regret about this book is that I waited so long to read it!  

Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows is the story of an older woman who is trying to be of service to the women of her community by having English classes for them at the temple, and the younger woman she hires who is trying to find herself as a “British and Punjabi and Sikh” woman.  This story is about immigration, how families react to it, and how communities of people gather to support each other.  It’s about generations as cultures evolve, and it’s about gender roles, and people, young, old, and in between, finding their way, and charting new territory.  

At the heart of Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows, it’s the tale of two sisters, one is traditional in the way of her parents, and one is not, and seeks to find her own way, following a winding path to do so, which includes some input from our titular widows.  And it’s also very much about the widows, and their erotic stories.  While the titular stories are included, and as described, why the widows are drawn to create and share these stories is really what makes the book so powerful.  Our group of widows includes some who had amazing marriages before their husbands passed away, and others who had fine marriages, and even others who suffered through horrible marriages.  Some women write stories of what they miss while others write of what they never got to experience.  There is no shame, no guilt, and only a little shyness once in a while.  This amazing group of women are the true stars of the book as they gather together and create their stories to share with each other of their private experiences or fantasies.  

It doesn’t hurt that I (accidentally) read this title in flyte with Winter’s Widow (The Wicked Winters Book 12) by Scarlett Scott.  In this open door, regency romance, widow Mirabel asks Demon Winter for his help in acquiring a lover.  He obliges, personally, and she learns all about what she was missing in her loveless marriage that made her a duchess and gave her three children, but zero passion.  This type of relationship is what all our Punjabi widows, and everyone really, deserve to find!  

I want to say more about Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows, but also I want you to experience it (and if open door isn’t for you, it would be super simple to skip the widow’s stories).  Goodreads classifies this title as contemporary fiction, but it could also be feminist fiction or multigenerational, and there are elements of romance and thriller too.  I give this genre bending title an emphatic 4 stars and may reread it, but will definitely recommend it!  

~Nikki

Balli Kaur Jaswal is the author of 4 novels: 2013’s Inheritance, 2016’s Sugarbread, 2017’s Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows, and 2019’s The Unlikely Adventures of the Shergil Sisters. I am here for her entire backlist and any future releases. Inheritance won her the Sydney Morning Herald’s Best Young Australian Novelist award in 2014. Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows has been optioned for film by Ridley Scott’s production company Scott Free Productions and Film Four in the UK. Happily, it has also been translated into 15 other languages! Jaswal’s short fiction and non-fiction works have been featured in multiple publications and periodicals. She was a writing fellow at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England, and taught creative writing at Yale-NUS College and Nanyang Technological University, both in Singapore, where she is currently working on a PhD.

This is one of those books, as Nikki stated above, that had been on my radar for years. A friend of the blog, and former roommate extraordinaire – you know who you are, read this book in 2018 and had recommended it to me way back then. It was just my getting around to reading it that was problematic. (Don’t @ me because I have read ACOTAR more than 5 times in the same years I could have read Erotic Stories, OK?!) This book was everything I wanted and expected and then some. Was I frustrated at the older generation of women, absolutely. Was I oftentimes just as frustrated with the younger women who were trying to balance their needs and desires for modernity and their needs to be able to fit in with their community? Also, yes. But, this is the balancing act many/most/all women of younger generations have to handle with their elders. I have experienced similar things in my own life. These are seemingly universal issues and it’s great to be able to experience them from another’s point of view. What, you mean by reading diverse books?! Yuppers I do.

My favorite part of Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows though, was the way Jaswal brought Southall, London, to life on the page. Nikki and I are middling-ly-well traveled, but neither of us have spent time in the UK. But, we’re familiar with public signage not only in different languages, but in multiple languages. Nikki specifically in multiple types of scripts. We’ve been honored to experience cultures and religions that are different from our own in their birthplaces. But, I love a good immigration story. It might be because I have a Canadian Adam that lives in my house, but it’s also because these stories are about how two peoples who are so different can learn to not just tolerate but celebrate each other’s cultures and traditions, then create new ones. I am American enough to admit that I truly enjoy the stories of immigrant peoples, and how those immigrant peoples congregate together in their new home to form a culture like and yet unlike the one they left [see also Re Jane]. I don’t think that these widows would have had the bravery to tell their erotic stories in such an open way in India, there would have been other expectations of them as widows. I think they needed to have the confidence of an immigrant experience to understand their ability and even need to express themselves in such a new way. And that’s a strength that’s rarely talked about.

How are you celebrating the diversity of women in your reading life this month?

~Ashley

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The following post includes affiliate links. More details here.  As you’re doing your Amazon shopping, we’d be ever so grateful if you’d use our affiliate link to do so as it helps pay the bills around here!

Lemme give you a sneak peak of today’s title, the rule for being a girl should be don’t overthink it (yes, this is most definitely me shoulding on society).  We all know things are more complex than that because dumb reasons that involve mostly people not being kind and trying to steal the joy of others.  I’m not here for that, but I am here for a book on the exact opposite, and I hope you are too.  If you are, then sign up here for our next Virtual Book Club on Friday, March 26th at 7:30 p.m. CST when we’ll discuss Don’t Overthink It: Make Easier Decisions, Stop Second-Guessing, and Bring More Joy To Your Life by Anne Bogel.  My guess is that Anne will be very upbeat but also real and kind, perhaps not as snarky as today’s title, but y’all, I love some snark.

Dear readers, I tried to #blameAnne for Rules for Being a Girl by Candace Bushnell and Katie Cotugno, but I can’t find a source list or episode, so that’s probably not it.  Oh well, I just wish I did know how this title landed on my TBR so I could say “please, may I have another” and also rage about the truths contained herein. (Ashley’s claiming responsibility, and she already adds to my TBR, so I’m set.)  We are hanging out in high school again this week, and even though I’m over that, I’m NOT over this title, which I read consumed in about 24 hours (including a work day, where I was actually at work).  Bushnell and Cotugno drew me in with Marin, who academically reminds me a lot of myself, and of Ashley (I *may* have texted her and said “3% spoiler time: The narrator is academically our people.”)  I, unlike Marin and Ashley, was smart enough to realize that college English through our local community college was much easier than AP English and took the easy way out (even though Ashley and I both had to “repeat it” in honors classes – see Monday’s mention of lengthy reading lists), but I digress. [Ashley adds that she didn’t take the AP English TEST because she wouldn’t need the credit and didn’t want the added stress at the end of senior year BECAUSE of said Honors College required freshman English courses.] Marin is a high school senior with the world open before her after she finishes her senior year.  She’s loved by her teachers, friends, parents, and even her boyfriend.  Marin doesn’t pay enough attention to secrets though.  My mother always told me, as her mother told her, if I didn’t want her to find out about it, I shouldn’t be doing it.  While I did not always heed that advice, it holds true.  But legit, when Marin’s teacher asks her to keep a secret, IT SHOULD HAVE BEEN A CLUE.  It was a clue for me in the form of a giant, glaring red flag, and then I was screaming at her next time.  Let’s be very clear dear readers about trigger warnings, if Marin and Bex were the same age, they could have had a miscommunication and nothing more would have come of it.  The issue came about because he was in a position of power.  My issue stems from him knowing it was wrong before he did it, yet he did it anyway.  (This is in the marketing copy, so it’s not a spoiler.)  

The powerful pieces of Rules for Being a Girl aren’t what Bex does, but how Marin reacts.  It takes her a bit, but she finds her voice.  THAT is my favorite part of this book, starting with the actual high school newspaper editorial that highlights all the struggles of all the lies we’ve been raised up on, been taught by society and the patriarchy.  Marin finds a teacher willing and able to pour into her and help her grow and use her voice, find her people, and that is the true joy of this book.  Did I want more ending?  Oh most certainly, but also, the ending we get in Rules for Being a Girl feels right.  I don’t even want an extended epilogue because I want Marin to be able to write her own story, and all the readers her age who read this to imagine themselves and the future they want in Marin’s place.  

Overall, I give Rules for Being a Girl 4.5 stars, which I’ll round up to 5.  This title is well written and powerful, and I am here for it!  We all need the joy of finding our people, even if we need to learn the lessons required to do so the hard way.  I am not certain I’ll reread this book, but I am very confident I’ll recommend it.  I also want to share two things before we go.  Thing that didn’t need to be included but was SO powerful: a feisty grandmother, because we all need more of this!  Things I did not appreciate about this book: the teacher is younger than me.  Y’all, I was not ready, this is not ok.   

What’s a book that makes you cringe but also so excited about the character development?

~Nikki 

I had heard of Candace Bushnell as an author for many years, but I haven’t read her 1996 debut novel, and her most famous, Sex and the City, which was the basis for the hit HBO series and two follow up movies. This New York Times Best Selling author’s books Lipstick Jungle and The Carrie Diaries were also made into popular television shows.  Rules for Being a Girl is her tenth novel and her first co-authorship.

Katie Cotugno is a New York Times Best Selling author of six full-length YA novels and multiple short works. Her website tagline is “messy, complicated, feminist love stories” and I’m here for all of the above. She writes under the pseudonym Ruby McNally to differentiate from her YA titles and to allow herself to write “smart, edgy, feminist love stories that are just a bit more grown-up.” What I’m understanding is that it means there’s sexytimes, and I’m here for all three of those in that type of genre. 

It took me a few false starts to figure out what I actually wanted to write about for today’s book review of Rules for Being a Girl and I latched on to the idea that this fictional story of one girl’s experience of sexual assault (minor spoiler, it was a kiss, but an unwanted kiss!) by a teacher is a textbook example of many girls’ sexual experiences at some point in their young lives, whether it be by a peer or someone older than themselves. Marin doesn’t know how to handle the emotions that come with such an experience, no one knows how it feels until it happens to them. Her inner monologue is at times righteously angry and frustratingly submissive. I am angry to know that I am not alone in realizing that girls are conditioned to think that in some way it is their fault for assault, that they are ‘asking for it,’ that they didn’t take the right precautions against unwanted or unasked for sexual attention. I am upset for Marin and every girl who thinks that their righteous anger at being assaulted is unjustified and the subsequent indignities the current system puts her through are justified. These things are NOT ok, and we need to do better for our girls (and boys).

It’s stated in the marketing copy, so this is not a spoiler, but Marin starts a feminist book club with the help of science teacher Ms. Klein. The best quote comes from the first book club meeting. We meet Eliza Hernandez, captain of the girls volleyball team. Eliza admits that the team is defending their title for state champion. Marin, co-editor of the school newspaper, admits that she didn’t know her school’s volleyball team was defending their state championship title and that it was obnoxious that there was no school pep rally scheduled for the team – but that the school’s mediocre at best football team received multiple pep rallies during their season. Eliza drops the bomb that the volleyball team can barely get a bus to take them to away games. Marin narrates: “It’s like now that I am looking for inequality, I’m seeing it everywhere, categorizing a thousand great and small unfairnesses everywhere I go. Why didn’t I see this before?”

The easiest answer to this question is because she wasn’t looking for it. Knowing the inequalities exist is one thing, but until you, or someone very close to you, has experienced these inequalities inherent in the system for yourself, most of the time one is not going to go looking for the ways the patriarchal, racist system keeps us all down. I say most of the time because there are those people who do not suffer from specific systemic inequalities but who do do the hard work to become educated, changing themselves and working towards changing the system.

Rules for Being a Girl, with it’s happily rounded to 5-star read, has put a wrench in my reading life this week because I thought I was just going to jump into the next books Nikki and I had already chosen for the blog, but when Bad Feminist by Roxanne Gay was given to Marin by Ms. Klein, and it had such a profound effect on Marin, I knew that I had to expand my own feminist education. I spent real dollars on the purchase of the Kindle book. Stay tuned for Monday’s post where we bring you some thought provoking non-fiction titles for Women’s History Month.

Has a fiction story ever derailed your reading train as Rules for Being a Girl has done to mine? If so, what story made the change in your itinerary and where did it take you?

~Ashley

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