Shobha Rao’s 2018 novel, Girls Burn Brighter is the story of two very poor Indian girls who become fast friends, and once they are separated, they spend much of the rest of their lives looking for one another. The two girls Poornima and Savitha, just a year or two apart in age.  At fifteen Poornima came of marriageable age, and she stopped going to convent school. She began to sit at the spinning wheel, the charkha, in her free time to help the household…that she, a girl, could earn anything at all, lent her such a deep and abiding feeling of importance, --of worth—that she sat at the charkha every chance she got….Their hut had no electricity, so her spinning was a race against the sun.At sixteen, Poornima’s mother dies, and she is promised in marriage to a farmer from another village. After a family death, it was inauspicious to have a celebration of any sort, let alone a wedding, for a full year. It had been two months since her mother’s death. In another ten—her father was saying—she would be married.Savitha comes into Poonima’s life because her father takes her on as a helper now that there is one charkha in the house free for use. Savitha was quiet around Poornima at first. She was a year or two older, Poornima guessed, though neither knew their exact ages. Only the birthdates of the boys were recorded in the village. Poornima’s father tells a story about how, when she was a baby, she had wandered into the river, "within seconds she was up to her neck". Her mother panicked, and her father chased after her. When I got near the waterline though, he said, I stopped. I know I should’ve plucked her up and given her a slap, but I couldn’t. You see, he said, she looked like she was nothing. Just a piece of debris.  In that mist, in that gray, in that vast, slippery rush of water, she looked like nothing. Maybe the head of a fish tossed back in the water...I looked at her, he said, I looked and I looked, and I could hear her mother shouting, running toward me, but I couldn’t move. I was standing there, and I was thinking. I was thinking: She’s just a girl. Let her go. By then, her mother had come up from behind me, and she’d snatched her out. Poornima was crying, he said, her mother was crying, too. Maybe they both knew what I thought. Maybe it was written on my face…An  then her father had let out a little laugh.’ That’s the thing with girls isn’t it?’  he’s said. ‘Whenever they stand on the edge of something, you can’t help it, you can’t. You think, Push. That’s all it would take. Just one push.’Before Poornima is shipped off to her new family, Savitha is raped by Poornima’s father, and since that means she is ruined in the village, there appears to be no future for her. The village men decide that justice requires Poornima’s father to marry Savitha. Before that marriage can take place, Savitha disappears from the village, and little attempt is made to find her. Poornima’s new husband disgusts her, and his family sees her as unworthy, eventually shipping her back to her village. Of course, the only thing Savitha has that she can sell to survive is her body, and she is soon in the hands of a brothel keeper named Guru. Turns out she has a skill for math, and eventually keeps the books for Guru.  All of the rest of this beautifully written but heartbreaking novel is taken up with Poornima’s search for Savitha—a search that takes her to many places and eventually to Seattle. Both girls end up in brothels, getting by only through the use of their bodies. While Savitha’s skill with numbers increases her status with the brothel keeper, there is no way to freedom.Savitha was seated in front of his desk, but she still slumped. She was tired, She was tired  of deals. Every moment in a woman’s life was a deal, a deal for her body: first for its blooming and then for its wilting; first for her bleeding and then for virginity and then for her bearing  (counting only the sons) and then f