Girls Burn Brighter by Shobha Rao

Clues to describe this book: Female Friendship, Struggle & Survival, Ambition, Feminism

Disclaimer: I received a free advanced digital copy of this book from Flatiron Books in exchange for my honest opinion. This has no effect on my opinion, review, or rating.

Review: I have been seeing Girls Burn Brighter by Shobha Rao popping up everywhere on Instagram and have been hearing raving reviews about it. It’s a powerful novel about two girls, Poornima and Savitha, who form a strong friendship. When a tragic circumstance stance happens, the girls are pulled apart. Poornima ends up on a long journey trying to find Savitha. Overall, I thought this book was okay. The beginning of the book piqued my interest and loved learning how they became friends. The author’s writing is amazing with the alternating perspectives from each main character. The characters are definitely well-developed as well. However, I had a very difficult time reading this book due to the extreme graphic content of rape, abuse, and human trafficking. When I initially read the premise, I knew it was going to be a heartbreaking story, but the warning without the extreme graphic content threw me off completely. The amount of extreme suffering and trauma each of the character goes through is so much that it made me feel emotionally drained by the end of the novel. I would only recommend this novel if you could read brutally heartbreaking novels. If I knew how graphic this would have been before I had a chance to read this, I would have skipped it all together. Girls Burn Brighter releases on Tuesday 3/6/18.