A review by woolgatherer
Honor by Thrity Umrigar

challenging dark emotional medium-paced

3.75

I had a lot of mixed feelings about this novel, though I wouldn’t necessarily say it was bad. To start with the good, while not perfectly executed, I really appreciated how Umrigar approached the nuances of privilege and its relationship to intersections of identity in India; how one navigates different spaces and conversations will heavily depend on one’s class, race, gender, religion, and nationality. This was especially explored through the protagonist, Smita, who is a relatively well-off Indian American Hindu woman in her motherland as a journalist.
All of this comes about through an in-depth look into religious conflict between Hindus and Muslims in India and the consequences that come with it. This is explored through a literal legal case in the book of a Hindu woman, Meena, who was violently attacked by her village for marrying a Muslim man, and the book’s primary focus becomes a push to get justice for her, which is all being documented by Smita. However, there was this indifferent yet voyeuristic perspective that felt a little off-putting, as it spun grief and trauma into a kind of sensational story that, frankly, I thought became more in-your-face due to it being presented as a legal case. In a way, there was some self-awareness of this perspective through the conflicted feelings Smita has of being back in India.

I think because of the way the book was framed, it led to me wanting more details about Meena’s case, and we sometimes get that from chapters that told her story from her perspective. There was a lot left to be desired with how the case come to an end, though. It also felt like Umrigar set aside Meena’s situation to focus more on the budding romance between Smita and her companion, Mohan. And, I won’t lie, it really rubbed me the wrong way how this explicitly came about.

Overall, I think there were a lot of complex ideas presented throughout Honor that made it hard to parse out how I felt about this book. I can’t help but wonder how different the book would be if it was framed differently and not through the eyes of a journalist. 
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