GET THIS BOOK

I know I said Origin by Dan Brown was my last book of the year, but I stumbled on this and couldn’t help myself.

Released on October 3, The Sun and Her Flowers offers perspective on a lot of sensitive aspects of a woman’s personal life; love, loss, heartbreak, trauma and motherhood, and controversial circumstances in Indian society which include culture, feminism, and immigration. As is obvious from her name, Rupi Kaur is an Indian woman who emigrated with her parents to Canada when she was four.

This book is small and succinct and took me only an hour to finish. I’m not much for poetry but this was so relatable and beautiful I actually cried. I think every woman who reads this book will find a piece of her within the pages. She talks about heartbreak and dealing with loss, discusses culture, the struggle for survival and her parents choice to emigrate, and their sacrifice for a better life. She talks about the infanticide of baby girls in Indian culture. Finally, she talks about finding love and learning to appreciate it.

Some of my favourite quotes are:

• “A lot of times we are angry at other people for not doing what we should have done for ourselves
• “It isn’t what we left behind that breaks me it’s whatever we could’ve built had we stayed”
• “You ask if we can still be friends, I explain how a honeybee does not dream kissing the mouth of a flower and then settle for its leaves”
• “You do not just wake up and become the butterfly, Growth is a process.”
• 1790: he takes the newborn girl from his wife, carries her to the neighbouring room, cradles her head with his left hand, and gently snaps her neck with his right
• 1990: a newspaper article reads a hundred baby girls were found buried behind a doctor’s house in a neighbouring village the wife wonders if that’s where he took her she imagines her daughter becoming the soil fertilizing the roots that feed this country
• “I found bits of him on bits of me, the sweat was not mine, the white between my legs, not mine, the bite marks, not mine, the smell, not mine, the blood, mine.”
• “They turned a suitcase full of clothes into a life and regular paychecks to make sure the children of immigrants wouldn’t hate them for being the children of immigrants. They worked too hard you can tell by their hands their eyes are begging for sleep but our mouths were begging to be fed.”

A few critics on Goodread had a lot to complain about having read her first book Milk and Honey. I haven’t, and so I have nothing to say in that regard. However, from some of the quotes above, you’ll see that the contents of this book are somewhat mature, graphic even. It’s a small book with a lot of illustrations but it most certainly is not a children’s book. Reader discretion is advised.

If you’ve read this book, I’d love to hear from you.
If you haven’t, get it here: The Sun and Her Flowers
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