Review: The Bitter Pill Social Club by Rohan Dahiya

TITLE: The Bitter Pill Social Club
AUTHOR: Rohan Dahiya
PUBLISHER: Bloomsbury India
GENRE: Contemporary Fiction
BLURB: Witness the private life of the world’s most beautiful animals.
You know exactly who they are. The ones who walk right past club lines, who get what they want before they ask for it. It’s a familiar cast: the centre of attention, the shameless flirt, the loudmouth, the narcissistic writer. You’ve seen them all. You’ve felt their Gucci-anointed aura. Laughing and dancing. Kissing the wrong people at the wrong time. Swaying to their own beat. Going out every night they’re sad. Finding solace in the crowd in a city paved with mildly good intentions and cocaine lines. A city of smooth talkers, armchair activists, and the rich brats of Instagram. A place to talk pop spirituality and purple prose in connoisseur-only jazz clubs.
The Bitter Pill Social Club takes a look at the lives of the Kochhar family, who find themselves drifting apart in the city of djinns, gins, and fake friends wrapped up in cigarette smoke. As one of their own gears up to tie the knot, three siblings come home to the neurotic parents who raised them. Meanwhile the parents face the family patriarch’s constant judgment. Divorce, disappointment, and disasters ensue as the entitled Kochhar brood dodges old lovers and marriage proposals.
BUY LINKS: Amazon India Flipkart Amazon UK Amazon US

MY RATING: 3.5/5
MY REVIEW:
The Bitter Pill Social Club is an Indian contemporary fiction that tells the story of the Kochhars, the rich and crazy family. The book reads like a satirical TV drama on the rich and famous that tells us the shenanigans of the various family members, the fights, the break ups, the make ups, a big fat indian wedding, it has got it all.

“The theory of comfort food is perhaps more personal than the clothes one uses to cover themselves from nakedness…..The concept at its basest level is a concoction that can not only bring peace to a stressed soul but also evoke the feeling of home….”

When the good folks at Bloomsbury India approached me for a blog tour and review of this book I was more than thrilled, I loved everything about it, the cover, the title, the blurb. It seemed like the read that you dive into to forget your own problems and watch the characters get a go at theirs. This book was exactly that, the plot revolves around the lives of the Kochhars, the spoilt brats of Delhi. It has a multitude of characters whose stories interlap each other’s. We have the social media queen, the undermined bestfriend, the confused cousin, a couple with a broken marriage, an old man who misses his family, the ever angry daughter and the agoraphobic with an unfortunate past. All the characters come with their own dramas and over the topness but underneath all that they will remind you of people in your own houses, cause at the end of the day they’re one big crazy family just like everybody else’s, well with an added dosage of drama that is.

Rohan Dahiya’s writing is what’s a highlight for this book, it alternates between conversation and description. The narrative is easy to follow and is quite humorous at times. The book itself doesn’t seem to have a particular plot direction but instead reads like a documentary of the family which actually works very well. It easily pulls you in and makes you get hooked on the family rivalries, the fights, the romantic relationships and all the flair that comes with being rich. I mean I couldn’t put down the book for the last hundred pages or so, it had me laughing and gasping all at the same time.

What was a major minus of my reading experience though was the lack of a proper timeline and the abrupt changes in POVs, it had me super confused on many occasions throughout my reading of the book. But I did like getting the various perspectives and I think my rating for this book would have definitely been higher if the structure of the narrative was a bit more proper and clearer. The over the top dramatics also had me cringing at times.

Well, over all I did enjoy reading about this messed up and crazy family. I suggest you give it a read when you need a little pick me up or it would also make for a good vacation read.

You can also checkout the playlist that’s been especially curated for the book here.

*Disclaimer: I was sent a free copy of this book by the publishers but as always the opinions stated are honest and unbiased.

See you soon! 😄
xo,Rishi