I tried my best to get into this supposed memoir, but it felt more like a textbook or an essay. While I appreciate learning more about the ahistorical aspects of where Zaidi lived, I wish there were more personal anecdotes rather than a listing of facts. I had high hopes for this one but the narration style was not for me, and I ended up not finishing the book,

A huge thank you to Netgalley and Cambridge University Press for the gifted ebook!

Zaidi's lexis dazzles through each penned composition voicing a valiant and scathing critique of falsified political institutions operating towards 'new' India and the materialization of Indian fascism.

I received a free pre-publication copy of the Kindle format from Netgalley in return for an honest review.

This book was not what I expected. Maybe the blame is on me, but I'd suggest the publisher's blurb was somewhat misleading. It's described as a 'memoir' and that's what I'd hoped for. The problem is that a memoir should be - in my opinion - a lot more personal than this. Instead, it's more like a collection of essays about what it's like to not fit in when living in India in which the places are connected by virtue of being places that the author has lived or considers as 'home' in one way or another. The problem is, she doesn't seem to really like any of those places very much and she seems deeply reluctant to give of herself. Whenever there's the slightest hint that something is about to get personal or revealing, she pulls away from the brink and delivers a rather dry but worthy essay on something else.

The first location, a cement mining and processing village in the Aravali hills of Rajastan, was the one I found most interesting. I've seen those villages so I could clearly picture them in my mind. She tells a little about growing up in a strictly regimented community where your house is a clear indication of your family's status. Then suddenly, she diverts to writing about local indigenous people being robbed of their land to make the cement factory village and this becomes the theme that's developed throughout the rest of the book - stealing land and status from the locals, exploiting their homeland whilst pushing them aside.

There are a number of other places where Zaidi herself is in the excluded groups - either by language, religion (one parent Muslim, one Hindu gives plenty of potential for exclusion), place of birth, gender or just being the wrong sort of person in the wrong place. Part of me thinks you've got to be a bit determined to so consistently NOT fit in anywhere.

I read a lot of books on exclusion and discrimination as part of the immigrant experience. What makes this different is that all the places and people described are 'Indian' but all of them are excluded within their own countries. In a land of 1.2-1.3 billion people, that's not hard to imagine, but I would have hoped to have seen a few examples of how India is also deeply hospitable to outsiders (I'm thinking - for example - of the acceptance of the Tibetan Buddhists forced out of their homeland by China and given refuge in the Himalayan regions of India). As a Brit, it was a bit of a relief to read an angry book about India that didn't seem determined to blame my country for all the evils of the world. But Zaidi definitely comes across as a very angry woman and one with a very hard carapace to protect herself and her history from being revealed on the page.

When the book was personal and revealing, I enjoyed it. When it went off on a tirade about discrimination, I liked it less. Bring me your personal evidence, your hurt and your tears and I'll read. Bring me dry, academic research and you engage me much less.

I believe the format I received is pre-publication and so I wasn't surprised that it's riddled with typos and wordsallstrungtogetherwithoutanyspacing. That happened a LOT. There's also a fault with seemingly random subtitles thrown into the text. I assume both will be fixed long before paying customers get to see the ebook as these are deeply irritating and distracting faults.

I'm sure there's a great writer in Zaidi but until she's willing to reveal herself, I wouldn't rush to read her again.

Reviewed at https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3291133401
Amazon.co.uk not accepting reviews at this time.

Thank you to Cambridge University Press and NetGalley for the Advanced Reader's Copy!

Available June 23 2020.

Like the country she lovingly describes, Annie Zaidi's "Bread Cement Cactus" is rooted in a quest for a home for the dispossessed. How strange it is, the experience of being made a stranger in your own home. Relating the personal to the political, Zaidi traces her lineage through the prominent Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh borders. In the mere nine chapters, she interrogates the subtle, nuanced ways in which culture and politics combine to enforce power dynamics and marginalized groups. With pointed critiques and stunning prose, she takes on everything from tribal servitude, vegetarianism, language politics and graveyard sites. What seems like a relatively simple statement, for example "most Indians are vegetarians", is then challenged and broken down into power dynamics and control over food supply chain, violence, and nutritional deprivation. In today's divided political climate, "Bread Cement Cactus" is a necessary call for nuance, perspective and balance.