The Unlikely Adventures of the Shergill Sisters by Balli Kaur Jaswal

The Unlikely Adventures of the Shergill Sisters by Balli Kaur Jaswal

My Rating: ★★★★

Right before Sita passes away, she writes a final letter to her daughters, Rajni, Jezmeen, and Shirina. The letter contains her final request: take the pilgrimage to India that she was unable to take herself. Her letter includes specific places she wants them to visit and tasks she wants them to complete. Along the way, she hopes that they will learn something about their mother while bonding with one another. Unfortunately, the three sisters are not close and they each view the trip as inconvenient. Busy dealing with their own personal problems and secrets, Rajni, Jezmeen, and Shirina bump heads and surprise themselves as their pilgrimage progresses.

I absolutely loved this book. The characters and their individual stories are so compelling that I never wanted to stop reading. Rajni, Jezmeen, and Shirina have been living their lives completely separate from one another because they don’t get along. Throw them together on a trip while they’re in the middle of personal crises, going on a trip far from home with people they don’t want to be stuck with is just icing on the cake. They each just want to jam through the trip, spread their mom’s ashes in her final resting place, and head back home.

I truly enjoyed each character. Told through rotating perspectives, we get to know Rajni, Jezmeen, and Shirina through their viewpoints as well as through each other’s eyes. We also get to see through Sita’s eyes in the prologue and a few flashback chapters. I loved watching the sisters get to know each other and come closer as well as watch them understand and get to know their mother the way they didn’t during her life.

One thing that was clear throughout the book is that there was a clash between tradition and modernism threaded through the character’s lives. Rajni and Jezmeen have very clear and strong modern views while Sita and Shirina are very traditional. It was interesting to see the sisters come to terms with this and see how traditional meeting modernism took them in different directions in their lives.

I was a bit confused by two of the secrets that Shirina and Rajni held onto for a good portion of the book. I understood why they didn’t share them with each other, but I didn’t understand why it was kept from readers when we were reading from their point of view. It was presented like readers knew what the secrets were. Whenever they thought about these two big secrets, they skirted around what exactly the issues were in their own minds, which became irritating after a while. I felt like skipping ahead just to find out what they were so I could continue in peace but held on until all was revealed. Unfortunately, after finishing the book, I still don’t see why we were kept in the dark for so long.

My other complaint is that the switch in narrators was not always clear. The first chapter had me confused for a hot minute every time the narrators changed because there was never a warning. I got used to it and could clearly tell who was narrating, but it was very confusing when narrators changed in the same paragraph and in the same sentence later in the book. I knocked a star off my rating because there should’ve been something to indicate that the narrator was about to change.

Otherwise, it was a wonderful book. I truly enjoyed the story. I love intricate stories about siblings, and this hit the spot. As someone who has older generations as well as cousins from my generation who are very traditional in my family, although from a different culture than the Shergill sisters, I enjoyed seeing the happy union as well as the clashes between modern and traditional values throughout the book.