Goddess Complex

Starred review from November 11, 2024
Sathian (Gold Diggers) wraps a whip-smart satire of Millennial womanhood around an arresting story of mistaken identity. Narrator Sanjana Satyananda leaves her husband, actor Killian Bane, behind at a commune in India, driven away by his pressure to have children. She returns to New Haven, Ct., where she confirms she’s pregnant and has an abortion. Afterward, however, she begins receiving mysterious text messages from strangers in India congratulating her on her pregnancy. Meanwhile, she struggles to restart her life, as she’s unable to contact Killian to initiate divorce proceedings. She also withers under the scrutiny of her married older sister, Maneesha, who monitors her on a home security camera while she house-sits for the Hindu couple, and chafes at her friend Lia’s joy at being pregnant. At Lia’s baby shower, a guest shows her an Instagram account belonging to a pregnant woman named Sanjena Sathian, who looks just like her, and she realizes the mystery messages are likely meant for Sanjena. The novel then morphs into a dazzling Operation Shylock–esque hall of mirrors, as the narrator heads back to India for the dual purpose of tracking down Killian and confronting her double, a search that eventually leads her to a Hindu fertility resort. Sathian’s social commentary is riotous (guests at Lia’s shower wear masks with Lia’s face emblazoned with the term “MommyBoss”) and she finds intriguing new angles on the doppelgänger theme (“I never knew you could accidentally become the wrong version of you”). This is incandescent. Agent: Susan Golomb, Writers House.

Starred review from February 1, 2025

Sathian's second novel (after Gold Diggers) opens with Sanjana Satyananda in the middle of divorcing her husband Killian, whom she left behind in India after they disagreed over whether to have children. They haven't spoken in nearly a year. Sanjana's best friend and her husband are gleefully expectant parents, whereas Sanjana is feeling melancholy about her own life after terminating a pregnancy before leaving Killian. Then Sanjana starts receiving texts from unknown senders congratulating her on her pregnancy and sending photos they believe are of her with Killian in India. But the pictured woman is not Sanjana, so she goes on a quest to find out who her doppelganger is and to learn more about her, her relationship with Killian, and the pregnancy. Relationships, mental health, well-being, motherhood, jealousy, and contentment are explored as Sanjana returns to India, where she winds up at a fertility clinic known as the God Complex. Readers may deem some of the novel's subplots more successful than others, but all will agree that the overall story remains suspenseful to the very end. VERDICT This well-crafted, mysterious novel with some dystopian twists is a worthwhile read. Fans of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale will devour it.--Shirley Quan

Copyright 2025 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

February 15, 2025
A fizzled marriage, baby anxiety, and a peculiar doppelg�nger lead a woman on a strange journey. Sanjana Satyananda, the narrator of Sathian's second novel, is in disarray. She's left her actor husband, Killian Bane, in Goa after confessing that she'd had an abortion. She's dropped out of her graduate anthropology program at Yale. Her friends' settling down grates on her, and she's been booted from her sister's Connecticut home after having been caught having sex there. And strange DMs are arriving: Why is she being congratulated by a stranger for being pregnant? From this setup, Sathian unspools a wide-ranging, at times hallucinatory yarn that encompasses her protagonist's frustrations with rigid rules about femininity, motherhood, Indian American social norms, and more. Sanjana's search for answers leads her back to India, where she attempts to track down Killian (now pursuing a Bollywood career) and his new partner, a lifestyle influencer named Sanjena Sathian (just like the author; note the ever-so-slight spelling difference from Sanjana). Not for nothing does the novel feature an epigraph from the Gothic classicRebecca; the novel is rife with doppelg�ngers, gaslighting, hidden histories, and more, all to the purpose of questioning the behavioral expectations placed on women like Sanjana. ("What made them want to change? What drew all these people to the other realm, the next stage of prescribed adulthood, while I was being left behind?") It's a noble goal, with fine set pieces that are both funny and melancholy, but its range is also a problem. The novel veers tonally from page-turning goofiness (mainly featuring a dog whose Instagram Sanjana is tasked with maintaining) to noirish melodrama, in a dense plot the latter pages strain to clarify. The depth of Sanjana's crisis is clear, but the story's ever-shifting status obscures her emotional state. An overdetermined tale of status and sexism.

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