"The Bandit Queens" by Parini Shroff

I just finished "The Bandit Queens" by Parini Shroff, the May selection for my Childless Collective Nomo Book Club. It's been recommended to me by a couple of other childless women and book review sites.  

Reading it, I was vaguely reminded of "How To Kill Your Family" by Bella Mackie, another book club selection from earlier this year.  Both are darkly funny novels about women murdering despicable family members. 

Geeta's no-good husband Ramesh disappeared five years ago -- and now everyone in the village thinks she killed him. They also think that she's a witch.  (As if they needed further proof of that, Geeta is childless.)  

But although Geeta is shunned and isolated, the villagers are also afraid enough of provoking her displeasure to support her small business, making wedding jewelry.  (She's saving money to buy herself a refrigerator.)  Geeta received money to fund her work from a local microlender, which brings her into regular contact with other women in the village who are part of her lending circle -- all mothers who talk endlessly about their children (hmmm, this sounds familiar...). The women meet each week to make payments on their loans and keep each other accountable:  if one person doesn't pay up, the others will be on the hook for the money.  

Then, one by one, other women in the circle start enlisting Geeta's help to kill their own husbands (!). Moreover, some of them are using blackmail to get her to do it.  I'm sure it's not a spoiler to say there are complications...!  

Interwoven throughout the narrative is the story of Phoolan Devi, "the Bandit Queen," who is something of an inspiration and role model to Geeta.  I thought Devi was a mythical or historical figure, but (as the author's note at the end of the book reveals) she was actually a real-life figure, born in 1963 (just a few years after me!) into a poor, low-caste family. In a nutshell, Devi was famous as a bandit-turned-politician (!) who punished the men who abused her. She was assassinated in 2001 at age 37.   

As in "How to Kills Your Family," the violence made me a bit queasy at times (both the murders and the domestic violence some of the men inflicted on their wives and others).  The book was also a sobering reminder of the poverty and extreme patriarchy some women continue to live under. It was a little long, and I had to stop from time to time to look up unfamiliar Indian terms.

But I loved how the women ultimately set aside their differences and came together to support each other and advocate for change and justice in their community. As the NoMo Book Club said in their Goodreads review of this book:  

Ultimately, the takeaway message from the book is that the unbearable burdens of life are made tolerable by the comradeship that can be found within true female friendship. Once the women stop turning on each other, but stand as a unified whole, they are an unstoppable force - something that any non-mother who has known the strength of joining a community of other childless women can understand all too well.

And I enjoyed the humour that helped to alleviate some of the tension. There were some truly ridiculous situations depicted (I could picture them like a movie in my mind), and some lines that made me chuckle (or laugh out loud outright). For example:  

• "Never send a god to do a goddess's job."
• "We can't just knock off everyone we don't like. This isn't Indian Idol." 
• "Shooting people makes me a don; killing a dog just makes me a psychopath.” (The dog doesn't get killed, although animal abuse and its effects are briefly depicted earlier in the book.)   
• "We’re happy to be accessories. Like jewelry, but way more dangerous." 

The last few chapters were tense -- but the line of the book left me with a smile on my face.  : ) 

4 stars on both Goodreads and StoryGraph. 

Shroff's next novel, "Some People" will be released in July. 

I was interested to learn that Shroff is/was a student and protegee of Elizabeth McCracken, who wrote one of my all-time favourite pregnancy loss memoirs, "An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination" (which I wrote about here as part of Mel's Barren B*tches Book Club), which contains one of my all-time favourite lines:  "Closure is bullshit."  

This was Book #7 read to date in 2026 (and Book #1 finished in April), bringing me to 18% of  my 2026 Goodreads Reading Challenge goal of 40 books. I am (for the moment, anyway...!) 5 books behind schedule to meet my goal.  :(  You can find reviews of all my books read to date in 2026 tagged as "2026 books."