Title: Chocolate Cherry Chai
Author: Taslim Burkowicz
Publisher: Fernwood Publishing
Genre: Fiction, New Adult Fiction
Rating: 4/5 stars
Review:

This book is a real roller coaster, let me tell you.
There’s a lot that I really enjoyed about this book. I found it informational and it opened up my world just a bit more.

Indian culture isn’t a culture that I’m super familiar with, I’ve never been to India and I don’t really have very many Indian friends. This book helped me learn a lot, what life is like for people coming to Canada with a different culture, and the struggles and the hardships that they face. The author writes of so many women that I’m not quite convinced are just words on a page. It all seems so real, it’s definitely inspired by true events and the stories of others. These stories are heartbreaking, the women who tell them get mistreated, shunned by their families forced to do things they don’t want to, forced to live lives that they have no say in.

I loved that Chocolate Cherry Chai dealt with these topics, and I also loved that this book branched out to more global setting. This book features so many different places, Tokyo, Philippines, India, Uganda, Pakistan, China, and of course, Canada. As a world traveller myself, I really loved how much I could tie my own experiences to what I read in this book! That was the best part of this for me, being able to relate to Maya’s experiences traveling abroad. That part I really found interesting.

As a teenage girl, I love that this book talks about becoming a woman in a way that’s so familiar. The girls in these stories, they live and become mothers, get married, they deal with the complex emotions that come with it, they reflect on their lives and how they made mistakes. It was really interesting to read about that.

I will say that this book was really sad at times. Sometimes I like the angst when I’m prepared to read with it, but there’s also that part of me that doesn’t want to be sad sometimes. Other than that, I would say that this is a good book. The only reason why I didn’t give it that extra 1 star just comes down to personal preference.

I really hope you enjoyed this book review for Chocolate Cherry Chai by Taslim Burkowicz, and I hope you check it out!

That’s all for today, thank you for reading and I hope you have a great week!

God bless <3

Here’s the official synopsis from Fernwood:

Young, free-spirited Maya Mubeen leaves behind the pressures of family, marriage and tradition for a life of experience and adventure — proving to herself, and her mother, that she is anything but a typical Indian girl. After diving with sharks in the Philippines and a sordid breakup amidst the bustling nightlife of Tokyo, Maya’s sense of who she is — and where home is — starts to falter.
An ancient chai-making ritual holds the key to Maya’s past and present, unlocking the secret lives of her mother, Nina, who lived through Idi Amin’s rule in Uganda, her grandmother, Nargis, forced into marriage at thirteen, her great-grandmother, Sukaina, an underground radical socialist who fled an abusive husband, and lastly, her great-great grandmother, Zainab, who left behind a luxurious life in India.
Traversing the globe and historical eras, Taslim Burkowicz’s debut Chocolate Cherry Chai binds together themes of familial pressures, the immigrant experience, motherhood, love and loss into a poetic narrative.