Far from her native India, Bonita is approached by a woman who, recognising a resemblance to her mother, reveals a hidden life to her.
As the story becomes more fanciful, we wonder if it was through the fresh eyes of the Stranger that she was able to glimpse her mother’s second life or, as she starts to believe, only through the deception of ‘the Trickster’. Whether shaman or charlatan, the image of her mother has been turned up-side down and Bonita, realising her inability to reconstruct her steps, substitutes her mother’s unknowable journey with her own.
Both a story of parallels and of distortion, it echoes the true story of an Indian artist who, on a scholarship to study mural art in Mexico, used the brutal and tragic elements of his teachers Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros in depictions of Partition Indian. Here too, we realise how experience exceeds its frame.

This was a short read but a struggle to get into at times. The writing was beautiful but I just could not connect with the book on the whole.
Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for the chance to read this ARC.

For such a short book i actually struggled with this one. The imagery is beautiful, i could picture the scenes perfectly, but the story just wasn't interesting for me. I didn't feel connected to any characters and wasn't really bothered what happened.

Anita Desai is one of my favorite writers. In this novel she explores mothers and daughters. It made me think about how little we know our mothers, how little they show us of themselves. It is philosophical, literary with occasional feelings of being betrayed. That said, I think the book could've been so much more I think, especially since Anita Desai is such a talented writer.

This book, although very short, packs a lot in its pages. It is a subtle and haunting story of understandings and misunderstandings, and there is something so wise about its quiet reflection.

I received an advanced copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

An intriguing little novella about a young Indian language student taking Spanish classes in Mexico. By pure chance, she meets an old woman who claims, unbelievably, to have known her mother. The two women go on to explore the mother's past as an artist, but all the while it remains doubtful whether the old woman is telling the truth.

From the Afterword the story appears to be inspired by the scholarship of Indian artist Satish Gujral and the parallels he drew between India's Partition and the Mexican revolution of the 1910s.

I appreciated the writing in this book but I failed to connect with the book. It took me several attempts to read this one and had it not been a novella , I suspect I would not have finished it. The examination of parent and child relationships would usually be something id be very interested in but something was missing for me or what is is more likely , what the author was attempting to do went over my head.
If you are a fan of Anita Desai, this novella will, no doubt, delight as some of the prose is beautiful but unfortunately I was not the right reader of or for this book.

This is such a poetic read , which can be read in one sitting. We meet Bonita in San Miguel in Mexico where she is a student.learning Spanish. Here she encounters a lady who says she knows her mother and she was an artist. Bonita doesn’t know anything about this. Bonita calls the woman a trickster because her mother never travelled to Mexico . It’s a short novella but is full of colourful imagery and descriptions of the beautiful scenery. The ocean is described beautifully and you can sense the atmosphere . It has an hypnotic feel , we are unsure about the trickster and whether she is telling the truth. It’s a story about mothers and daughters and grief, as well as culture and art.

In Anita Desai's novella, "Rosarita," she examines how a daughter must confront how much she does and does not know about her mother's life. A daughter studying in Mexico encounters a woman who claims to have known the mother. Is the woman lying or is the daughter discovering her mother's life as an artist? Desai connects these elements with discussion of Partition so the novella is not just about the mother, but about how war, race and caste can make us strangers even to our loved ones.

I wish the novella were more compelling. I was interested in the story, but it felt slight. I would have preferred a novel-length look at this same story. Desai has a wonderful prose style that kept me invested in the story even when the story was not that engaging. If the characters and story had been fleshed out (as in Mason's other work), "Rosarita" would have had more resonance. The novella is fine, but I wish it has been longer.

From award-winning Indian novelist Anita Desai, Rosarita delves into a tale of searching and self-discovery told through a daughter chasing the memory of her mother in a foreign land. Living in San Miguel, Mexico, as a student far from her home in India, the last thing Bonita expects to find is any familial connections as she improves her Spanish. Yet an unexpected encounter from an insistent stranger sends her reeling into a journey to uncover her mother’s memory and find answers for herself.

Told in the second-person voice, Rosarita reads like poetic stage directions, casting the reader as a suspicious Bonita, immediately dubious of the effusive stranger, Vicky, claiming to have known Bonita’s mother, Rosarita. Confident her mother had never even been to Mexico and was certainly not an artist as this stranger insists, Bonita initially resists Vicky’s invitation for connection and remembrance. Yet, as she reflects on her own memories of her mother while growing up in India under the critical dominance of her father, dormant yet unrelenting questions about her mother, her suppressed history, and subsequently Bonita’s own decisions, are awoken within the protagonist.

“You had resisted her fantastical tale but now find you would like to believe it. Could she, like a wizard or a magician, bring your mother to life again even if it is a life you never knew or suspected?”

Thus compelled, Bonita seeks out Vicky and together, they retrace Rosarita’s time in Mexico. Their journey takes them to an artists’ commune and to Vicky’s home in Colima before coming to an end in La Manzanilla, a seaside haven for artists where Rosarita had recovered from an illness. As Bonita ventures forth, she is confronted with more questions.

“How could she have come on this adventure without uttering a word to you, to any of her family, then return simply to resume the life she knew? How could it be possible to live parallel lives with no apparent connection? How could she not have left any clues other than the Trickster’s tales, which have led you nowhere?”

One of the few details Bonita knows about Rosarita’s past is that it was spent travelling on trains, a phenomenon further discussed in the Author’s Note. Desai explains that following the partition of India in 1947, trains transported countless refugees over the new borders between India and Pakistan. This parallels the use of trains for carrying revolutionaries and military forces in the Mexican Revolution. Indian refugee Satish Gujral, an artist who studied in Mexico on a scholarship, observed these similarities and depicted the same scenes of violence in his own work as that of his Mexican art instructors, including Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siquerios.

Through the eyes of an artist and cross-generational narrative, Desai connects Mexican and Indian history while exploring the understanding of self through another culture and familial choices. Rosarita illuminates migration as a catalyst for discovery and connectedness and captures the complexity of learning about those familiar to us yet shrouded in mystery through the memories of another narrator. For those with an unknown or estranged past, the challenge of piecing together one’s own history is a daunting yet irresistible one.

Who do we become when we leave our homeland? And who are we if we return? How do we choose which stories to tell? How do our experiences also shape our loved ones and our relationships with them? Can we fully know ourselves if we don’t fully know our history? Desai’s Rosarita is a prolific tribute to the questions faced by migrant women in their journeys across borders, cultures, time, and identity.

Probably best for fans of Anita Desai. I found it confusing and it didn't really go anywhere. I really only finished it because it was so short. The book had a great premise which it didn't really fulfil.

A novella about a young Indian woman on holiday in Mexico, meeting an older woman, who claims to have known the former's mother many years ago, meeting her when she was travelling alone in Mexico to learn to paint. The young woman is torn between disbelief (as the older woman's story contrasts with her own knowledge of her mother) and a sense that there might be something to the woman's story after all.

The best things about the book are the concept and the brevity. Otherwise, the writing is confusing and obscure, the story jumps around between periods as well as fiction and reality, and can't seem to really capture the reader's attention. My main issue is that I'm not sure what I read, why I read it, and what it was about. A long time has passed since I felt intimidated by books that I failed to understand. Now I just find them pretentious.

My thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for providing me with an early copy of this book in return for an honest review.

As beautiful the cover of this book was I was hoping the story would be beautiful as well. But a few pages in, this book just failed to connect with me. I tried shaking it off and tried to reconnect with it but in vain. Though the written style is easy, it was just not meant for me.

Thanks to netgalley and the publishers for this ARC.

'Rosarita' is a novella written in the relatively rarely seen second person (i.e. the 'you' perspective where the reader is addressed directly). The central character is Bonita, a young Indian woman who has travelled to Mexico to study Spanish. There she has a chance encounter with a woman who claims to have known her mother - Rosarita - despite Bonita being unaware of her mother ever having visited the country.

The writing style is easily readable and it's refreshing to read something in the second person. The sense of place is well evoked, I can see the colours and colonial buildings quite clearly in my mind. Initially I found the story intriguing - had Rosarita really visited Mexico? If not, why did the woman claim to have known her - what was her real agenda? But then I got frustrated when none of these questions were answered and the story just petered out. In fact I was stunned when it finished - I hadn't realised how close I was to the end, and it certainly didn't feel like it should be ending. Sometimes an ambiguous ending can work well, but in this case it just left me feeling that I'd wasted my time reading this far. I didn't feel like I learned anything about Bonita or Rosarita.

It's a shame because on first signs I thought this would be a really good book and Anita Desai can certainly write well. But this is one for people who like slow paced books that are more about the journey than the destination. It's not one for people who like plot driven stories, and not for those who dislike loose ends being left untied. As I'm someone who fits both of the last two categories, it gets a two star rating.

This book featured some gorgeous writing, although I struggled with the lack of plot direction unfortunately! I felt like I was reading a steady stream of thoughts with no real direction or movement, despite my desperate attempts to really sink my teeth in. Still, beautiful words and flow of writing.

Beautiful writing, as readers have come to expect from Anita Desai. The story itself in this short novel is a little less convincing if taken as a straightforward plot, but it more of an exploration of the relationship between parents and children, and how what is known and what is unknown affects our sense of self. There is an almost dreamlike quality to the writing, but for this reviewer the plot left too many questions unanswered, with the book not entirely satisfying because of it.

There is no denying Anita Desai's legacy within Indian literary fiction ; Booker prize shortlisted three times!
So a new novel is always interesting... Rosarita is in many ways a novella -just over 100 pages

The story focuses on Bonita who is on a visit to Mexico when an elderly lady claims that she looks just like her mother who visited Mexico to study art; Bonita is confused as she doesn't believe the lady' "The Trickster"... and so begins a journey to try to find the truth about her mother.
This novel is hypnotic in its beautiful prose and feels languid from the heat of the Mexican location - the narrative pulls you in and weaves itself around you.

This is a story about identity and family - trying to understand where we come from and uncovering the past.
Beautiful, an enigma and leaves you questioning the reality of the plot.

A one-sit read that rewards in many different ways

Having recently finished “Rosarita” by Anita Desai, I found myself deeply moved by its rich, contemplative narrative and the way it seamlessly intertwines themes of memory, identity, and familial legacy. The story follows Bonita, a young Indian student in San Miguel, Mexico, who encounters a mysterious woman claiming to recognize her due to an uncanny resemblance to Bonita’s mother, who, as the woman asserts, once traveled to Mexico as an artist. This unexpected meeting propels Bonita into an emotional journey to uncover the truth about her mother’s past, challenging everything she thought she knew about her family.

Desai’s writing is, as always, exquisitely lyrical and evocative. Her ability to convey complex emotions through simple, elegant prose is truly remarkable. The setting of San Miguel is brought to life with vivid descriptions that capture the essence of the town’s vibrant culture and serene beauty. The contrast between Bonita’s initial sense of blissful isolation and the subsequent unraveling of her mother’s hidden history creates a compelling tension that drives the narrative forward.

What struck me most about “Rosarita” was its exploration of the intergenerational connections and the way the past continuously shapes the present. The novel delves into the idea that our identities are intricately linked to our ancestors’ stories, even those we are unaware of. Bonita’s journey becomes a metaphor for the universal quest to understand one’s roots and the complex web of relationships that define us.

Overall, “Rosarita” is a hauntingly beautiful novel that resonates long after the last page is turned. It’s a testament to Anita Desai’s masterful storytelling and her profound understanding of the human condition. This book is a must-read for anyone who appreciates introspective, character-driven fiction that explores the intricate layers of memory and identity.


Thank you Netgalley and Pan Macmillan for the ARC in exchange of an honest review!

Rosarita by Anita Desai is a short novel told in the second person that is very evocative as well as intriguing and mysterious.