Honor, by Thrity Umrigar

Honor, by Thrity Umrigar, is indeed as immersive and wonderfully written as folks have been saying. This would be an excellent read for the upcoming spring, sitting with the sun’s heat on your legs to match the heat of the setting and discussing with a book club, as Reese suggests.

The book is about Smita, a journalist who travels to India to work on a story. The story she goes to cover is the other half of this book, and the intricate ways that Smita’s history and own personal journey weaves in and out of the lives of those she interviews is very interesting.

An interfaith marriage ended in tragedy, Smita covers the dimensions of grief, the heart-rending struggle that people go through balancing love with culture, religious expectations with personal convictions, and the consequences and reasons that rip us open as humans.

The story is vivid, and Umrigar’s writing is lovely. There are difficult passages as Smita covers the details of arson, murder, and intense feelings of shame, guilt, grieving, loss, and as a few episodes of intense trauma related to the story she is covering are told in the book.

This is a great fit for book clubs, and what I loved about it most was how well it touches on the disparity that can exist but is often overlooked between religion, culture, and personal expectations and how those three things pull at all of us in wonderful and sometimes disastrous ways.

Honor, by Thrity Umrigar, is available now wherever you get your books.

**I was invited by Algonquin books to read an ARC in exchange for featuring this book on my blog. All opinions are my own.