Take a photo of a barcode or cover
horrorbutch 's review for:
Brideprice.com
by Eve Francis
Disclaimer: I received an e-copy of this book on NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
Krystal and Brianna are roommates and graduate students. Krystal loved Bollywood movies, Brianna loves Star War marathons. They are also best friends and so when Krystal finds out her childhood best friend and ex-girlfriend is getting married in an arranged wedding, she needs to go to the wedding to stop her and Brianna drives her there.
This is a very short story and features a lot of Indian Culture, which was nice. Krystal is also adopted and thus feels quite disconnected from her family (who only adopted her for money anyway) and we get a lot of flashbacks to how Gita helped her at that time in her life. Gita also always hated arranged marriages and so Krystal is very worried about her getting married in one. At first I was worried there would be biphobia (ala she's getting married to a man omg) but thankfully that wasn't there, it was actually just worry about her getting married in a marriage she had always vocally despised.
One thing I really didn't like how Krystal treated Indian Culture. She was really obsessed with it (as she was with Gita) and it just felt a bit weird? There's nothing wrong with appreciating another culture of course, but in Krystal's case, it kind of felt fetishizing and I didn't like it. There are also some gross comments from Krystal in general, as well as stalking.like behavior. Krystal is definitely an unreliable narrator and super unlikeable to me because of her creepy behaviour. And while this behavior is kind of called out, I didn't think like it was called out enough, except by the character who actually had to suffer through it.
The story was also very rushed and we didn't get to know Brianna that all, so the end of the book didn't really make sense to me. All in all, I would have loved this story to be more developed, Krystal's creepy behavior to be called out and more development between Brianna and Krystal. In the end, this was an interesting short story, but it could have been way better.
Krystal and Brianna are roommates and graduate students. Krystal loved Bollywood movies, Brianna loves Star War marathons. They are also best friends and so when Krystal finds out her childhood best friend and ex-girlfriend is getting married in an arranged wedding, she needs to go to the wedding to stop her and Brianna drives her there.
This is a very short story and features a lot of Indian Culture, which was nice. Krystal is also adopted and thus feels quite disconnected from her family (who only adopted her for money anyway) and we get a lot of flashbacks to how Gita helped her at that time in her life. Gita also always hated arranged marriages and so Krystal is very worried about her getting married in one. At first I was worried there would be biphobia (ala she's getting married to a man omg) but thankfully that wasn't there, it was actually just worry about her getting married in a marriage she had always vocally despised.
One thing I really didn't like how Krystal treated Indian Culture. She was really obsessed with it (as she was with Gita) and it just felt a bit weird? There's nothing wrong with appreciating another culture of course, but in Krystal's case, it kind of felt fetishizing and I didn't like it. There are also some gross comments from Krystal in general, as well as stalking.like behavior. Krystal is definitely an unreliable narrator and super unlikeable to me because of her creepy behaviour. And while this behavior is kind of called out, I didn't think like it was called out enough, except by the character who actually had to suffer through it.
The story was also very rushed and we didn't get to know Brianna that all, so the end of the book didn't really make sense to me. All in all, I would have loved this story to be more developed, Krystal's creepy behavior to be called out and more development between Brianna and Krystal. In the end, this was an interesting short story, but it could have been way better.