Sejal Badani

This emotional and beautifully written novel had me turning pages way past bedtime to find out how it ended. My emotions were so invested in the characters and the plot that there is no way I could have gone to sleep without knowing the outcome for all of the main characters.

This story is told by two women - the wife and the 'other woman' who are both part of Eric's life. Celine has been married to Eric for over 17 years and they have one son Brian who is 12. She runs a horse farm and is show more buying it from her uncle with monthly payments. Even though her life with her husband is strained right now, she is happy with her family and her farm. From a young age, she dealt with issues of abandonment after her father left when she was 5 and never came back. These issues still affect her life and marriage.

Felicity is the 'other woman'. She and Eric had a one night stand seventeen years earlier and the result was their son Justin. Over the years, Eric has worked to be a father to Justin and to make him feel loved. Many times over the years when he told Celine that he was traveling for his job, he was spending time with his other family in Chicago. Felicity feels that it's time to make them a real family and re-locates to Boston where Eric lives with his family in hopes that he'll leave Celine.

Life would have continued on the same until Brian gets a diagnosis of leukemia. It's at a dangerous stage and family and friends get tested to see if they can give bone marrow to help Brian's possible recovery. When no one matches, Eric feels like he has to tell Celine about Justin because there is a good chance that he's a match for Brian and may provide a way to save Brian. Felicity doesn't want to take the chance of something happening to Justin during the procedure so she forbids it to happen. The fallout from Eric's confession effects everyone especially Justin who feels that he's been lied too for years. Celine can't believe that her entire marriage has been a lie but will do anything to save Brian.

This is the story of mothers and the unconditional love that they have for their sons. It's an emotional story about family, forgiveness and how a diagnosis of cancer changes lives in a deep and meaningful way. It also looks at the need for truth and honesty in a marriage or relationship. The characters in this story will stay with me long after the end of the book. show less

“The Sun’s Shadow” by Sejal Badani is a heartrending and powerful exploration of betrayal, maternal sacrifice, and the hope that flickers even in the darkest corners of grief. From the first page, I was drawn into the lives of two women—Celine and Felicity—whose paths collide under the most heartbreaking of circumstances.

Celine’s world begins to unravel when her 12-year-old son, Brian, is diagnosed with cancer. At the same time, she discovers her husband Eric’s long-held show more secret: a teenage son, Justin, from a past affair. Justin’s mother Felicity has moved to Boston hoping for acknowledgment and a future with the man she’s shared in secret for nearly two decades. But what begins as a confrontation becomes a reluctant alliance when Justin turns out to be Brian’s only hope for survival.

What makes this novel shine is its refusal to reduce any character to a trope. Celine is more than a wronged wife—she’s a woman of strength, tethered to the land and family she’s fought to preserve. Felicity is not merely “the other woman”—she’s a mother shaped by sacrifice and longing. Their shared love for their sons becomes the bridge between them, leading to one of the most emotional and redemptive arcs I’ve read in a long time.

Badani writes with a gentle, thoughtful style that lets the emotions feel real and natural. Her writing is clear but powerful; switching between the two women’s perspectives helps us understand each of them fully. The story explores forgiveness, identity, and the challenges of motherhood with care and insight.

I loved the beautifully developed relationship between Justin and Brian—a bond of brothers that forms despite betrayal and pain.

This is not a light read—grief, illness, and betrayal weigh heavily. It provides hopeful meditation on what it means to love selflessly, to face truth, and to find healing not in perfection, but in the messiness of real life.

I closed the final page with tears in my eyes and a deep sense of gratitude for stories like this—stories that challenge, comfort, and stay with you.

Highly recommended for fans of emotionally rich fiction, stories about motherhood, and anyone who believes in the redemptive power of second chances. show less

No one on the outside ever knows what goes on under the surface of a family. A perfect façade leaves those looking in thinking that the family is in fact, if not perfect, then darn close and lucky to be there. But facades can be faked, manufactured, and can have little connection to reality. This is how abusers get away with their trade for so long. Someone has to crack the superficial lie before the horrific truth emerges into the light. This is very much the case in Sejal Badani's novel, show more Trail of Broken Wings, about one Indian American family and its legacy of abuse.

As Brent lies in an inexplicable coma, his three daughters and his wife gather round him in what might be a show of love and devotion. In fact, they are each grappling with their long and terrifying past with the man in the hospital bed, even as they continue to maintain the careful façade they have created over the years. Trisha, the favorite daughter and the only one to escape the brutal and constant beatings, mourns the loss of her beloved father, even as she recognizes the ways he terrorized her sisters, compartmentalizing them from the loving man she knew. Oldest daughter Marin, now a mother herself, has always been driven to perfection in order to prove her worth and to hopefully forestall the beatings. Youngest daughter Sonya is the prodigal, the one who was uncertain whether she'd come home for this vigil, the one who fled her father's fists and left her family behind so long ago to photograph the world. But really there is no escape, not for Brent's daughters, not for his wife Ranee. The mental and emotional scars are forever, the long term psychological fallout for them as survivors of abuse is greater than they ever imagined, and they are all damaged.

As each of the women gather at Brent's bedside, she keeps the secrets she's hidden for so long. The relationships amongst all of these women are strained by their past, their resentments, and their inability to allow anyone, even fellow sufferers, to see the full extent of their shame. Reading about these women is emotionally taxing, especially in the chapters told by Sonya in first person. The other chapters focused on her sisters and her mother are told in third person, giving them a modicum of distance that her own painful musings do not have. The story moves backwards and forwards in time, from the happier, pre-abusive times when they lived in India to the dawning frustration of life in America where Brent faced racism, marginalization, and a demeaning that he could not absorb, reflecting it instead, and then finally to the horrors he inflicted on the family who depended on him. With the coma giving his family time to decide what Brent's reckoning must ultimately be, the story is very heavy feeling and makes the reader wonder if they can possibly heal. There are some unexpected twists and turns in the story which helps when it seems as if it is going on just a bit too long but the ending itself, for several of the characters, is not entirely in keeping with the tone of the novel. After years of dragging this terrible baggage and being unable to face or acknowledge it, an ending promising so much hope seems too easy and unearned. Despite that, this is a realistic and difficult portrayal of lives in the aftermath of abuse and the ways in which silence is so much the enemy of truth and healing. show less

‘Trail of Broken Wings’ seems to present an honest depiction of a family devastated by the brutality of an abusive husband and father. As the fallen patriarch lays in a coma, his daughters, Sonya, Trisha, and Marin grapple with the scars that are now affecting their own relationships as adults. Sonya, who escaped her father’s persecution, has returned home to face her persecutor. Trisha, the one most loved by her dad, has built a perfect home and life for herself, only to eventually show more find her life an illusion. And Marin, the family’s overachiever, cannot control her seemingly perfect world.
The story juxtaposes between the different points of view of the three daughters and their mother in short chapters, which, especially at the beginning of the story, left me sometimes trying to recall which point of view I was reading. As the reader is drawn into the emotional events of the story, this problem was remedied, as it became clearer as to who these characters were.
Nevertheless, I was intrigued by the characterization of this Indian family, led by an abusive father, who acculturates into American society. The story clearly shows how family dynamics, punctuated by abusiveness, can have profound, negative effects on all family members and can even transcend through generations. show less