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'honor' is a searing meditation on the meaning of dignity in a dehumanizing world.

Sharmila Mukherjee

Thrity Umrigar's important new novel Honor isn't an easy read.

From depictions of casual misogyny to distressing scenes of public shaming, mistreatment and torture, the novel shows the terrifying social forces that strip vulnerable people of dignity and render them animal-like. It's a searing meditation on the meaning of dignity in a dehumanizing world.

Honor is set in today's India. This isn't the globalized India of news or the India of IT excellence and an ambitious space mission. It's the unseemly side of the country, blighted by cultural conservatism, poverty, sectarian violence, caste hierarchies and misogyny.

Umrigar, an English professor at Case Western Reserve University, has set several of her past novels in this tumultuous India, investigating fraught social issues such as caste and class divides, the lure of fundamentalism and culture clash. Her critically acclaimed novel The Space Between Us told with impeccable delicacy a story of friendship between two women of different backgrounds. Honor adds an element that the author has not addressed before: extreme violence.

Umrigar writes not only as an elegant storyteller but as a sharp-eyed reporter, no doubt informed by her experience as a former journalist. Her reportorial style takes us deep into the lives and minds of vividly realized characters, showing us their gestural quirks, geniality and, at times, horrific cruelty. If you are familiar with the country, the novel's depiction of Indian manners will seem startlingly true-to-life.

Umrigar's reportorial style is particularly apt because her central character, Smita Agarwal, is a journalist. Born in India, Smita moved to the U.S. with her family when she was a teen. Twenty years later, she arrives in Mumbai to help her friend, a fellow journalist, Shannon Carpenter, recover from a serious injury. In truth, Shannon wants her to cover an assignment for her: a grisly crime in a village named Birwad on the Maharashtra-Gujarat border.

Meena, a Hindu woman, and Abdul, a Muslim man, fell in love and married in defiance of the social proscription against interfaith marriage. Infuriated by the perceived dishonor she has caused to the family, Meena's brothers set them on fire in their home. Abdul has died; but Meena, pregnant at the time, survives, although severely disabled. She has filed a lawsuit against her brothers with the help of a lawyer activist, Anjali, and is awaiting the court's verdict. The story confirms everything Smita dislikes about India: its social backwardness and lack of respect for civil liberty. Still, she agrees to step in and makes the journey to the country's dark reaches. But by now it is clear to the reader that Smita is carrying an emotional baggage of her own surrounding the circumstances of her family's departure for the U.S.

As much as Honor is about India's humanitarian crisis, it is also about a transformative journey. We witness Smita's emotional and spiritual blossoming in the process of writing.

Honor leads us from the dirty, crowded but cosmopolitan Mumbai into the choking, retrograde world of Birwad, exposing India's entrenched prejudices and twisted patriarchal values. Nowhere is this more clearly shown than in the opinion of a villager Smita interviews. Commenting on Meena's brothers, he says: "Killing that Muslim dog? Fine. But they should not have touched that girl. No, he should have just dragged her back home and kept her locked up for the cooking-cleaning." Umrigar unsparingly reveals the social conditioning that enables persecution.

To inhabit Birwad and its surrounds is to be enclosed in a bell jar of violence, fire and smoke. Embodying the destructive forces of the region is Rupal, the chief of the neighboring village of Vithalgaon, who aided Meena's brothers in their heinous act. In this novel, there's no whodunit-style mystery, no genius villain lurking to be caught. The horror is how unabashedly Rupal gloats over the crime as a justified act of honor.

Yet the novel is not without relief from its gruesome portrayal of depravity. Meena's reminiscence of her love for Abdul, told in the first person, has a sweet tenderness. Once Smita and Meena talk, the asymmetrical structure of the interview begins to dissolve; the space between them closes up.

Nightmarish violence explodes once the court verdict comes out. The terrible events that ensue allow Umrigar to uncover the meaning of honor: not in grand acts of heroism but in small gestures of dignity and care.

Honor calls to mind Megha Majumdar's novel A Burning . Both novels emerge from the same world of rot: India's deep seated hatred, poverty, illiteracy and corruption. Both examine our capacity for moral behavior in the face of extreme circumstances. But Umrigar's vision is more optimistic than Majumdar's.

By the end of the novel Smita not only finds companionship, purpose and the ability to confront her trauma but she also learns the value of selflessness. Smita's friendship and romance with a man named Mohan is crucial in opening her to the Eastern philosophical tradition based on sacrifice. Umrigar suggests that the solution to India's social ills lies in this philosophical tradition rather than in Western tenets of individualism.

Writing about a social problem in a developing country is a notoriously difficult task. For one thing, it can easily become poverty porn, written for the perverse entertainment of privileged Western readers. The story of a transformative journey of a privileged character at the expense of disadvantaged subjects may also sound exploitative. Then there's the question: What should one do in response to a social crisis?

Umrigar tackles some of these challenges well. Yet she also lapses into sentimental didacticism that sounds inauthentic. The novel's conclusion is a crowd pleasing melodrama that ticks all the correct boxes. To some extent it follows inevitably from the novel's premise. But for all its structural weakness, the earnestness of Umrigar's intention is unquestionable: She convinces us that to read is to comprehend and to comprehend is to act.

Sharmila Mukherjee's writing has been published or is forthcoming in The Seattle Times, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Star Tribune and the Washington Post. She holds a PhD in English from the University of Washington.

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by Thrity Umrigar ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 11, 2022

A graphic parable of contemporary India delivered in broad brush strokes.

An Indian woman who's spent most of her life in the United States develops a bond with a woman in rural India who's been subjected to appalling violence.

Returning to the topic of India’s evolution, Umrigar delivers the discussion through the admittedly biased perspective of Indian-born, U.S.–raised journalist Smita Agarwal. Immigrating with her family to Ohio at age 14, Smita “had vowed never to step foot into India again,” for reasons revealed only late in the book. But then her friend Shannon, the South Asia correspondent for her newspaper, breaks her hip, and Smita, who's vacationing nearby, flies into Mumbai to support her in the hospital. Shannon's injury has forced her to abandon an important story that fits Smita’s beat of gender issues, and Smita now finds herself taking on the assignment, one which will force her to deal “with everything that she detested about this country—its treatment of women, its religious strife, its conservatism.” All these unpleasant traits and more are encapsulated in the tale of Meena Mustafa, a Hindu village girl whose scandalous work in a factory, marriage to Abdul, a Muslim, and pregnancy affront her two brothers, who respond violently “to protect the honor of all Hindus.” They burn Abdul alive, leaving Meena surviving but badly disfigured. Umrigar’s juxtaposition of urban norms with the archaic, impoverished rural hinterland, as well as Abdul’s dreams of himself and Meena as a modern, integrated couple, delivers a clear message but a starkly delineated one, its allegorical quality intensified by one-dimensional supporting characters. The horror and Meena’s intense suffering also contrast uneasily with a late love story for Smita—“He was the best of what India had to offer”—and some binary, not always plausible choices.

Pub Date: Jan. 11, 2022

ISBN: 978-1-61620-995-7

Page Count: 336

Publisher: Algonquin

Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2021

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2021

LITERARY FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP

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by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 6, 2024

A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.

A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.

When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.

Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024

ISBN: 9781250178633

Page Count: 480

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023

FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP | GENERAL FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION

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by Barbara Kingsolver ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 18, 2022

An angry, powerful book seething with love and outrage for a community too often stereotyped or ignored.

Inspired by David Copperfield , Kingsolver crafts a 21st-century coming-of-age story set in America’s hard-pressed rural South.

It’s not necessary to have read Dickens’ famous novel to appreciate Kingsolver’s absorbing tale, but those who have will savor the tough-minded changes she rings on his Victorian sentimentality while affirming his stinging critique of a heartless society. Our soon-to-be orphaned narrator’s mother is a substance-abusing teenage single mom who checks out via OD on his 11th birthday, and Demon’s cynical, wised-up voice is light-years removed from David Copperfield’s earnest tone. Yet readers also see the yearning for love and wells of compassion hidden beneath his self-protective exterior. Like pretty much everyone else in Lee County, Virginia, hollowed out economically by the coal and tobacco industries, he sees himself as someone with no prospects and little worth. One of Kingsolver’s major themes, hit a little too insistently, is the contempt felt by participants in the modern capitalist economy for those rooted in older ways of life. More nuanced and emotionally engaging is Demon’s fierce attachment to his home ground, a place where he is known and supported, tested to the breaking point as the opiate epidemic engulfs it. Kingsolver’s ferocious indictment of the pharmaceutical industry, angrily stated by a local girl who has become a nurse, is in the best Dickensian tradition, and Demon gives a harrowing account of his descent into addiction with his beloved Dori (as naïve as Dickens’ Dora in her own screwed-up way). Does knowledge offer a way out of this sinkhole? A committed teacher tries to enlighten Demon’s seventh grade class about how the resource-rich countryside was pillaged and abandoned, but Kingsolver doesn’t air-brush his students’ dismissal of this history or the prejudice encountered by this African American outsider and his White wife. She is an art teacher who guides Demon toward self-expression, just as his friend Tommy provokes his dawning understanding of how their world has been shaped by outside forces and what he might be able to do about it.

Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2022

ISBN: 978-0-06-325-1922

Page Count: 560

Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: July 13, 2022

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2022

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The Melodramatic Bookworm

Books. Movies. Travel. Thoughts.

Honor by Thrity Umrigar | Book Review

Today is my blog tour stop for this hard-hitting, searing work of fiction that sadly reflects reality. Thank you, Algonquin Books for having me on this tour, and thank you, Thrity Umrigar, for writing it!

TW// Rape, sexual violence, violence, murder, death, sexism.

Honor is about two women, Smita and Meena, whose lives become so intricately intertwined that after a while, it becomes difficult to point out where one story starts and where the other ends.

Smita, an America-based journalist, is called to Mumbai to cover the story of a burn victim because her colleague is unwell. Coming to Mumbai is going to open old wounds and bring her secrets spilling out, but she figures Meena’s story is an important one to tell. Meena, who married a Muslim man, and was promptly disowned by her Hindu family. Meena, whose house was set on fire by her own brothers for ‘tarnishing’ their family name by marrying a Muslim man and whose husband died in that fire. Meena, whose case has now been taken up by a lawyer who wants to bring justice to her, but is that the lawyer’s intention?

When Smita begins work on this story, little does she know how all of this is going to affect her. Little does she know how her life is going to change in so many ways, that she just cannot count and comprehend.

Thrity Umrigar’s ‘Honor’ is a searing story of honor killings, religious fundamentalism and extremism, and the worst of humanity. It was my first book of 2022 and reading it has broken something inside of me. Every time I read a book like this, I lose faith in humanity because I know that the extent of these barbarisms isn’t fictionalized. And I gag on my own runaway thoughts, the what-ifs, the whys, the hows. The hypocrisy, the utter assholery of men trying to act like God wrote the bloody, violent rules that they think they need to act upon. Of them saying that women need to serve them because God willed them to be. Of them disowning women for working. Of them slapping, raping, burning, killing women for ‘dishonoring’ them by loving someone from a different religion.

Who the heck gave them the right to do that? Where does this god complex come from? How do they figure themselves to be at the top of the pecking order? Who gave them the right to oppress women? Just men, thousands of years ago, who were so full of themselves that they thought it right to filter down these thoughts through millennia and generations. It’s extremely frustrating and angering.

‘Honor’ is a book that will raise all these questions and will anger you to no end. Thrity Umrigar’s writing is pregnant with horror as it describes the barbarian behavior of men in the name of religion that makes you want to claw at their faces, to slap them. But they are blinded by their faith, their religion. They rape, kill, and dishonor women, all in the name of honor. And irony dies a few million deaths every day.

Thank you, Thrity Umrigar, for writing this important book, for your firebrand writing, for the unapologetically frank descriptions, and for tackling this subject with such sensitivity.

Rating: 4.5/5 stars

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BookBrowse Reviews Honor by Thrity Umrigar

Summary  |  Excerpt  |  Reading Guide  |  Discuss  |  Reviews  |  Beyond the book  |  Read-Alikes  |  Genres & Themes  |  Author Bio

by Thrity Umrigar

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An Indian American journalist returns to the nation of her birth to report on the story of a Hindu woman whose brothers murdered her Muslim husband.

First Impressions readers enjoyed being transported to India via Thrity Umrigar's novel Honor , with 36 out of 38 rating the book four or five stars. What it's about: Smita—a Mumbai native who is now an American journalist, reluctantly returns to India on an assignment she accepted as a favor to a friend. Her assignment is to profile Meena, a Hindu villager whose Muslim husband was burned to death in an "honor killing" by Meena's brothers. Meena, left disfigured in the attack, has brought charges; a verdict pends. Umrigar's strength is her great storytelling. As always, not a word is wasted as she moves us through urban Mumbai and into Meena's rural village, and into complex encounters and confrontations that Smita views with double vision as an Indian American. Her investigation stirs up painful memories of her youth in Mumbai, during the years when rising Hindu nationalism reawakened the violence of partition, now a fact of life in India. At the center of the story is Smita's developing bond with Meena and with Mohan, the friend of her friend, who is acting as her guide, driver and protector in a village where women are not supposed to work, let alone as journalists (Janice P). Readers appreciated the insight into different facets of life in India: You will be transported to India where you will learn about the American journalist who tells the story of Meena and Abdul. These pages are written with reality, tenderness and insight into how we are more alike than different (Helen P). Umrigar brings the city of Mumbai to life with her descriptions of the crowds, the heat, the beauty and the cultural disparities. You feel as if you are on the journey with them whether they are in a large city or a remote village (Joan V). Though the subject matter can be difficult, the book has an approachable style: While it is painful to read some scenes, Umrigar allows the reader to look into the windows of goodness in the hearts of people who attempt to make change in this world of sadness (Maribeth R). I feel the author's talent lies in delving into and describing the atrocity of acts of misogyny and other inequalities while not pushing the reader away in the process. This is a book and author not to be forgotten, both for subject matter and for her skill in drawing the reader into a place that's not easy to be in (Becky D). It is hard subject matter to read, but Umrigar does it in such a way that you feel the injustice, the hate, the pain, but can continue reading. She is a master at balancing the horror of what mankind is capable of, while also showing the love, loyalty, and compassion that lives within so many (Kate S). Those familiar with Thrity Umrigar's work appreciated this book's place in her oeuvre: I have read many of Thrity Umrigar's earlier works and found them all to be thoughtful and rich, and Honor is no exception (Nancy L). This was an easy book to rate: five stars, no hesitation (Joan V). I am a loyal fan of Umrigar's work, and she did not disappoint. Honor was well-written, with a compelling storyline. Heartbreaking, and anger-inducing. All in all, an excellent and important book, highly recommended (Cheryl S). I've been a fan of Thrity Umrigar's fiction since the 2006 publication of The Space Between Us . A Mumbai native who emigrated to the United States at 21, her novels all explore the various "spaces" between us — caste or class, religion, race, above all gender — within the social context of modern India, but with timely parallels to the United States (Janice P). Many noted that Honor offers rich topics of discussion for book clubs: Thrity Umrigar is a masterful writer whose characters are well-developed. I highly recommend Honor to all readers. Book clubs will have lots to talk about (Esther L). The book offers much to discuss for book clubs: oppression, opportunity, hope, religious differences, familial devotion, misogyny, friendship, betrayal, love and honor. I loved this book and I will recommend it to my book club (Helen P). Honor is a captivating read, an intriguing window into a culture as well as a really good story. Book clubs will find endless areas of discussion (Donna M).

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Beyond the Book:    Escalating Anti-Muslim Sentiment in India

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#BookReview Honor by Thrity Umrigar @ThrityUmrigar @AlgonquinBooks @ThomasAllenLTD #Honor #ThrityUmrigar

In this riveting and immersive novel, bestselling author Thrity Umrigar tells the story of two couples and the sometimes dangerous and heartbreaking challenges of love across a cultural divide.

Indian American journalist Smita has returned to India to cover a story, but reluctantly: long ago she and her family left the country with no intention of ever coming back. As she follows the case of Meena—a Hindu woman attacked by members of her own village and her own family for marrying a Muslim man—Smita comes face to face with a society where tradition carries more weight than one’s own heart, and a story that threatens to unearth the painful secrets of Smita’s own past. While Meena’s fate hangs in the balance, Smita tries in every way she can to right the scales. She also finds herself increasingly drawn to Mohan, an Indian man she meets while on assignment. But the dual love stories of Honor are as different as the cultures of Meena and Smita themselves: Smita realizes she has the freedom to enter into a casual affair, knowing she can decide later how much it means to her.

In this tender and evocative novel about love, hope, familial devotion, betrayal, and sacrifice, Thrity Umrigar shows us two courageous women trying to navigate how to be true to their homelands and themselves at the same time.

Tragic, thought-provoking, and affecting!

Honor is a powerful, riveting, emotionally-charged novel that sweeps you away to present-day India and into the lives of a handful of people, including Smita Agarwal, an Indian American journalist who, after being shamed as a child and adamant she would never set foot in India ever again, finds herself travelling back to the country of her youth to cover the harrowing story of Meena Mustafa, a young Hindu girl who, after falling for and marrying a man of Muslim faith, endures horrific familial violence, shoulders extreme grief, and sacrifices everything she has all in the name of “Honor.”

The prose is lyrical and expressive. The characters, including all the supporting characters, are vulnerable, conflicted, and scarred. And the plot is a profoundly moving tale of life, loss, shame, misogyny, ostracism, class division, poverty, desperation, corruption, suffering, courage, friendship, and forbidden love.

Overall,  Honor  will make you think, it will break your heart, and it will resonate with you long after the final page. It’s a powerful, hopeful, enthralling tale by Umrigar that uses exquisite character development to weave a transformative exploration with a beautiful, bittersweet story of female friendship all steeped in an abundance of violence and pain.

This book is available now. 

Pick up a copy from your favourite retailer or from one of the following links.

Thank you to Thomas Allen & Son for providing me with a copy in exchange for an honest review.

About Thrity Umrigar

Thrity Umrigar is the bestselling author of eight novels, including The Space Between Us, which was a finalist for the PEN/Beyond Margins Award, as well as a memoir and three picture books. Her books have been translated into several languages and published in more than fifteen countries. She is the winner of a Lambda Literary Award and a Seth Rosenberg Award and is Distinguished Professor of English at Case Western Reserve University. A recipient of the Nieman Fellowship to Harvard, she has contributed to the Boston Globe , the Washington Post, the New York Times and Huffington Post.

Photo courtesy of algonquin.com.

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HONOR is a perfect title for Thrity Umrigar's powerful novel about India and the horrors that are perpetrated in rural areas in the name of religion and honor. Umrigar makes it clear that while India is the setting for this tragic story, the prejudice and hatred toward women and others who are deemed less than worthy are not confined to a particular country.

Smita is a journalist who comes back to India, where she and her family had fled decades before, to assist a colleague in need. But after arriving in Mumbai, Smita is dismayed to realize that her friend doesn't want her help personally, but expects her to cover a story she’s been working on. Smita has very mixed feelings about returning to the country of her childhood. Umrigar deftly creates an enigma as we grow to understand that something tragic happened to cause Smita and her loved ones to flee, but it's shrouded in mystery while we view India through her admittedly prejudiced eyes.

Smita's assignment concerns Meena, a Hindu woman who fell in love with a Muslim man, Abdul. While most of the novel is told from Smita's point of view in third person, Meena shares her love story in first person. The narrative is intensely moving and recounts a “Romeo and Juliet” tragedy. After Meena elopes with Abdul and lives with him for four blissful months in his village, she gets pregnant. When they tell her brothers their happy news, hoping that such joyful tidings will soften their hearts, they fly into a rage.

We read about how completely and rabidly the Hindus in their small town hate the Muslims. In the rural area where they all reside, it's as if time has frozen for hundreds of years. They believe in magic and that the village chief, a hateful man named Rupal, talks directly to God on his phone. If Rupal warns the local police to stay away from a crime scene, they obey.

"HONOR is a moving account of the multifaceted layers that are India --- both the beauty and the ugliness. It's a novel that screams 'book club' because of its thoughtful and beautiful prose and the essential points it raises."

So when Meena's husband is doused with gasoline and set on fire, no one intervenes. Meena tries to put out the flames with her hands, which causes her to be severely injured and horribly maimed. A lawyer convinces her to sue her evil brothers for Abdul's death, and she bravely agrees to do so. We learn about the ubiquitous corruption of the police and their refusal to do anything to help Meena. Abru, Meena's daughter, is cursed by both Hindus and Muslims as she is neither and both at the same time. To Meena, Abru is the culmination of her love for Abdul, and she will do anything for Abru. They live with Abdul's mother, who abuses Meena and berates her, blaming her for what happened to Abdul.

There are multiple layers to this novel. On one level, it's the story of rural India and the twin horrors of misogyny and religious fanaticism. At one point, I was reminded of the oft-repeated saying of Lyndon Johnson: “If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you.” Here we see that even the poorest, most pathetic man feels powerful because he can look down on any woman. And any Hindu man is able to subjugate not only women, but Muslims even more. Smita is frustrated when she cannot even sign for a hotel room when they visit Meena. Umrigar mentions the "clerk's casual misogyny" and writes, "This was the real India, revealing itself to her in small slights and grave tragedies."

Yet on another level, the story is about Smita and Mohan, her colleague's friend who becomes her escort and driver into the rural area where she must interview Meena and go to court when the case is decided. They are thrown together, and the friction is apparent. Through Smita's eyes, Mohan is forced to acknowledge the parts of India to which he had been blind, growing up with privilege as the son of a wealthy diamond merchant. Outside of Mumbai, his beloved India is not modern and urbane, but rather filled with the prejudice of the caste system, the horror of religious fervor and its attendant violence, and the repugnant corruption of not only the police but also the judicial system.

Umrigar's writing cuts us like a knife. She forces us to look at the horrors done in the name of honor, and makes us realize that while we smugly believe we are better than those in rural third world countries, that is not the case. When the lawyer tells Smita that the village chief is a monster, Umrigar compels us to face that truth:

" Monster, Demon, Satan . In Smita's line of work, people often bandied around such terms to explain away horrendous behavior. Every time there was a mass shooting in America, for instance, there was a rush to label the shooter a crazed monster, rather than place him within the context of a culture that fetishized guns. Every time a cop shot dead a black man, there was an attempt to paint him as a rogue cop. But what about the millions of otherwise normal people who were recruited to massacre strangers during a war? Were they all evil? How alarmingly easy it had been to get millions to participate in genocide during both the Holocaust and Partition. Human beings could apparently be turned into killers as effortlessly as turning a key. All one had to do was use a few buzzwords: God. Country. Religion. Honor. No, men like Rupal were not the problem. The problem lay with the culture from which they bubbled up."

In spite of the violence and brutality of the deaths here, Umrigar's message seems ultimately hopeful: Through small steps, by refusing to accept cruelty and bigotry, change will happen. But she also recognizes that women bear the brunt of the violence. Depressingly, she writes that "it seemed to Smita that the history of the world was written in female blood." Rape, domestic violence, female genital mutilation, and women being frightened, isolated and abused are not limited to any country. Smita, whose job has taken her all over the world, understands that as much as anyone could.

HONOR is a moving account of the multifaceted layers that are India --- both the beauty and the ugliness. It's a novel that screams "book club" because of its thoughtful and beautiful prose and the essential points it raises.

Reviewed by Pamela Kramer on January 21, 2022

Honor by Thrity Umrigar

• Publication Date: October 18, 2022
• Genres: Fiction , Women's Fiction
• Paperback: 352 pages
• Publisher: Algonquin Books
• ISBN-10: 1643753304
• ISBN-13: 9781643753300

A book of horror and hope in India, inspired by extremists closer to home

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By Thrity Umrigar Algonquin: 336 pages, $27 If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org , whose fees support independent bookstores.

Thrity Umrigar wants to talk about megachurches, which seems both apropos and slightly incongruous. Her new novel, “ Honor ,” turns on India’s two major faiths, Hinduism and Islam, and the violence that can erupt when an extremist faction holds sway.

“Honor,” which was announced this week as a Reese’s Book Club pick, involves — among many other events — a deadly clash between two brothers who believe India should be a Hindu theocracy and their sister’s husband, a Muslim from a nearby village. But Umrigar, whose eight previous novels have been set in both the United States and India, knows fundamentalism can spring from any faith.

“A thing for Western readers to realize about India is, guess what? We [Americans] have people doing crazy things, too. Maybe a few fundamentalist Christians pick up ‘Honor’ and think, ‘Wow, why do I believe what my pastor says when he’s saying the kinds of things that sound nutty coming from one of my characters’ mouths?’”

If this kind of secular awakening is unlikely, Umrigar thinks she might know why. “The follow-up question to why we have these megachurches , I think, should be what is the secular equivalent? What do we have that gives people the same sense of community and belonging, which I think is essential to the human spirit?”

She anticipates the answer, then flicks it away: “You can talk about libraries and books and museums, but those are almost by definition, sadly, becoming elitist. What provides the same sense of solace and neighborliness that a church does?”

Perhaps a writer? Umrigar is speaking from her home in Cleveland, Ohio, where she has lived since the age of 21 and works as a professor at Case Western Reserve University. Her elegant demeanor, literary references and Zoom backdrop — bookshelves, art objects — could be considered, objectively, elitist. But Umrigar possesses a level of curiosity and compassion I rarely encounter in other human beings, even the many curious and compassionate authors I’ve interviewed.

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A clue to her perspective comes from Sarah Willis, a novelist and the fiction buyer at Loganberry Books in Cleveland who has known Umrigar for nearly 20 years. They meet regularly for lunch with a group informally known as “The Pen Women” to talk writing — but not always.

“Sometimes we talk about shoes!” Willis says. “But Thrity would never talk about shoes. She’ll bring up politics. She says she writes her books to understand the world, but one of the things she’s writing about is how people treat each other…

“She believes that words can change people — that the words themselves have power, not her. Her books are always about someone trying to change and become a better person.”

In “Honor,” that person is an Indian American journalist, Smita Agarwal, who reluctantly flies to India to help Shannon, a colleague sidelined with a broken hip. Shannon has been covering a powerful story about a young widow whose brothers killed her husband, Abdul, and disfigured her. The widow, Meena Mustafa, has decided to take her brothers to court, an almost unprecedented move in the realm of honor killings. Shannon pleads with Smita to travel to the remote village of Birwad and interview Meena before the trial.

When I tell Umrigar this book, with its strong romantic elements, seems like a slight departure from her other work, she smiles. “I’m delighted to hear you say so, because maybe that will attract other readers! But yes, OK, there are two parallel love stories in this book and maybe that’s a little different.” Nonetheless, she maintains, “I’m still writing about issues that haunt me, about power and power differentials.”

A cursory look at the summary above might suggest the plot turns on Smita’s power in the situation. Instead, “It’s Meena who ends up being the teacher,” Umrigar says. “She’s more radical and courageous than any of the characters who hold what we currently call privilege in the developed world. Meena actually does something,” first by defying deep taboos and then by defending her rights. “These are radical transgressions for which she pays a very, very heavy price. Yet she still manages to teach Smita and her companion Mohan” — an Indian executive she meets during the assignment — “a great deal about love and, yes, honor.”

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“Honor” is the first of Umrigar’s novels to be published by Algonquin Books; Executive Editor Kathy Pories says it was “the simplicity of the title,” with its many connotations, that first struck her. “You don’t know what it means until you read the book.” But it was the author’s “effortless writing” that made her want to work with her. “You trust her. You can tell that she has so much affection for India, through dark moments and beautiful moments both.”

For Umrigar, “India” is another word with many valences. “One of the things Smita winds up telling Mohan is ‘My India is not your India.’ She’s trying to tell him that the India he sees as developed and progressive is not the one in which she grew up, but her statement has a deeper meaning. India is multivarious, even for individual people.”

Mohan is perhaps the character most like the author. His India was once Umrigar’s too. She grew up there during the ‘60s and ‘70s, and “one of the joys of living in India at that time, at least in Bombay as it was called then, is that it was cosmopolitan and a genuinely secular city... But there has clearly been a backlash to all of that, with deep roots that are not simple. Remember, Gandhi was assassinated by a Hindu fundamentalist.” Decades later, she believes “the Hindu right wing realized there was political gain to be made from wielding power.”

Once again, Umrigar invokes a comparison closer to her present home.

“You have to understand that I wrote ‘Honor’ during the Trump years,” she says. “I was writing about India, but I was also writing about my own adopted country. This othering of others is not a phenomena you can assign to any one country. The trend winds are blowing across the world’s two largest democracies, India and the United States. I am sometimes appalled and bewildered and dismayed by the parallels.”

Trying to make sense of it, and perhaps to explain the role of a writer and her words, Umrigar invokes the playwright Tony Kushner , “who is one of my heroes. He says something to the effect of: Hope is not a choice. Hope is a moral obligation. I try and live by those words. I may sometimes not feel hopeful about my own personal circumstances, which is absurd because I’ve had every opportunity and privilege in the world. But I always feel hopeful about humanity.”

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Honor | Thrity Umrigar | Book Review

“Because a woman can live in one of two houses—fear or love. It is impossible to live in both at the same time.” ―  Thrity Umrigar, Honor

First Impression:

After two intense novels The Space Between Us and The Secrets Between Us, Thrity Umrigar is back with another hard-hitting book, Honor, published on 4 January 2022 by Algonquin Books. I had ample expectations from this one, having loved her other two books. And, I wasn’t disappointed.

Smita Agarwal, who left India as a teen two decades ago and doesn’t want anything to do with this country, comes back to cover a story. She is a journalist and is supposed to replace her hospitalized colleague. She lies to her father that she is still on her Maldives vacation. 

The story that Smita is meant to cover speaks of Meena Mustafa, a woman whose house was set on fire when she was pregnant. Her husband Abdul died in the fire; while she survives with severe injuries and delivers Abru. She strongly believes that her brothers did it and files a case with the help of lawyer Anjali.

Will Meena win the case? Why does Smita dissociate from her motherland? Will she carry more than a story back home? What will happen to Abru now? This is for you to read.

The story is set in modern-day India, after 2008. Honour killings are a ghastly reality even today. It is for this fear of losing honour that women aren’t allowed to move cities, make friends or just be themselves. Things are worse in rural India with meager access to police and legal aid. 

Throughout the book, you feel like you are in a dystopian world – until you aren’t. It is the world we live in. Thrity talks about casteism, patriarchy, religious fanaticism, crime, and India’s police and legal setup. How bloodthirsty and sick, people can become merely because someone has different religious or social beliefs.

Thrity points out the casual sexism and misogyny which we ignore in our daily lives. For example, when Smita goes to Meena’s village along with Mohan (her assistant) she is advised to buy and wear modest clothes as villagers wouldn’t welcome her modern attire. This made me feel like I went back in time but it was only the start.

Writing style:

Thrity’s writing style is very engaging because she is elaborate and vivid in her descriptions. She is extremely honest and powerful with her words. You can feel it all happening in front of your eyes and it really does. The language is moderate so beginners may give it a try to improve their own.

Characters:

The characters in this book are all strong, deep, and intense. They aren’t scared of expressing their opinions – be it Smita about her experiences in India or Meena’s brothers about how she should have died. Each character has a story of itself; Thrity does justice to all of them. Alongside the two leading ladies, we get to meet Smita’s co-worker Mohan, Meena’s mother-in-law, her haughty village head, her brothers, Anjali (the lawyer dealing with Meena’s case through an NPO), and Smita’s immigrant family.

Reading experience:

Honor doesn’t just describe; it makes us think. It makes us wonder how easily we scroll through articles that say people were murdered because of their religion, caste, and gender. It makes us think about why we cannot do anything about these barriers. This book isn’t an easy read. It felt definitely longer than 336 pages probably because I often stopped. I stopped when I was angry, sad, and hurt. I stopped to ask myself what I am doing for the women who aren’t as fortunate as me.

This book can be read by everyone, especially by those who believe the social evils mentioned above don’t exist anymore. The theme, as already obvious, is dark and heavy. It is extremely brave of Thrity Umrigar to have selected a topic so sensitive and have written an inferno. 

Can’t wait to read it? Buy your copy of Honor using the link below.

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About the Author

Prakarsha pilla.

I am Prakarsha, a millennial kid (okay, woman) from Hyderabad, India. I am a student, dog mom, ardent reader, amateur writer, and occasional reviewer. When not any of these, I am a passionate napper. I read crime fiction, thrillers, and mysteries mostly. Other genres I read are women's fiction and of course, books related to animals. I believe reading changes lives, though all it changed to date is my spects' size.

Check latest articles from this author:

Lallan sweets | srishti chaudhary | book review, the stationery shop of tehran | marjan kamali | book review, when women lead | julia boorstin | book review, related articles, 27 souls: spine chilling scary stories | vaidehi taman | book review, the lost treasure of azad hind fauj | piyush rohankar | book review, सुनो माँ (suno maa) | संदीप भूतोड़िया (sundeep bhutoria) | पुस्तक समीक्षा, wildhood awakened: stories of a childhood near chilika lake | amruta kaustubh | book review.

Book Review: Honor by Thrity Umrigar

Jun 28, 2022 | Book Reviews , Literary Fiction | 8 comments

This is a story that will stay with me for quite awhile. The details, setting, and circumstances may fade from my memory, but I’ll always remember the protagonist Meena – the woman who sacrificed her body for those she loved. Honor by Thrity Umrigar * is a bestselling novel, many people have read it, including thousands of book clubbers as it also has the Resse’s Book Club stamp of approval. As much as I loathe to admit that I follow an actress’s book recommendations, I typically enjoy everything she suggests, and Honor is no different. It feels strange to declare my love for a book that’s so filled with people’s pain, but it’s true, I loved this one despite the horror I felt as I continued through its pages.

Plot Summary

Smita has interrupted her long-awaited vacation to help a fellow journalist. She has flown to India on a moment’s notice, and upon arriving realizes her friend wants her to help her with a story. So Smita travels to a poor village in the rural part of India to interview Meena, a Hindu woman who was attacked by her own brothers for marrying a Muslim man. Her husband was killed, and she was permanently injured, so she is pressing charges against her brothers and the villagers who helped set the fire that took so much from Meena. Smita is reluctant to even travel back to India because of her history; she was born there, but her family fled when she was a teenager. Despite her extensive international travel as a journalist covering major world conflicts, Smita can’t help but resent and despise her homeland for what she sees as its backward ways, crowded and dirty streets, and horrific treatment of women. In addition to this swirling of emotions, Smita is accompanied by an interpreter named Mohan, an Indian man who loves his country. He is set on showing Smita the beauty of India that she’s forgotten and together they face the horrors of Meena’s life and circumstances in the face of their growing fondness for each other.

My Thoughts

Most people are aware of the atrocities that can be found in other countries, and in India, we often hear about the brutality of the caste system and the acid attacks on women. Even though this is a work of fiction, we know that cases similar to Meena’s have occurred, and Umrigar confirms this in her acknowledgements. When Smita meets Meena, and observes her scars and challenging life firsthand, I felt simultaneously sick to my stomach for her situation (which is no doubt the life of many women in rural India), and grateful for my life of luxury in comparison – physical and emotional luxuries and freedoms that women like her will never experience. Smita mirrors the readers’ emotions in many ways; she is uncomfortable in India’s heat and poverty, and often daydreams of her austere, clean and well-appointed apartment back in New York City. But Mohan’s character acts as another buffer – he wants to show Smita the joys of India in the crown of flowers a cow wears, or the heady scents of jasmine that fill the night air. Ultimately, this book is about a place that contains both horror and beauty, and reconciling those vastly different sides.

It isn’t until about two thirds of the way through that we discover why Smita’s family moved to America, and as the suspension builds, we realize it’s going to be bad, but not as bad as what Meena has experienced. It’s this stacking of traumas that generates a feeling of guilt in Smita – why was she given the chance to escape, when Meena is not?

“She could cover heartbreaking events in Lebanon and South Africa and Nigeria and not feel complicit in those because they had not happened in her own country. But despite her American passport, despite the many miles between her American life and her Indian childhood, there was no denying it – sitting with Meena on that cot, she had felt complicit in what had happened to her.” -p. 23 of Honor by Thrity Umrigar

Some short chapters are told from Meena’s perspective, but most of them are told through Smita’s eyes, which makes Meena’s circumstances seem even more unbelievable. And some of the characters that are introduced to us, for example the leader of the village who ordered the attack on her husband, are depicted as evil but still…human. Smita observes that even though these men are playing with people’s lives and hold power over an entire village, they still observe the caste system, and refuse to stand taller than Mohan when they realize he is wealthier than them: yet again another contradiction that Umrigar depicts in this book. This isn’t a book for everyone, it’s an emotional read that will haunt you, but the writing is so incredible and expansive that the turmoil is worth it.

*One of the joys of blogging for as long as I have is discovering the fact that I reviewed a children’s picture book written by Umrigar and totally forgotten about it! Check out that review here.

Spread the Word!

I feel like I need to read something by this author. This sounds heavy but nuanced, which I appreciate.

I think you would like her Laila, but as you said, this one is heavy so you need to be in the right mindset

I’ve complained in the past about how I want to read more books set in India and by Indiana authors, but the plots are so similar and frustrating that I don’t. It’s usually a young girl who is obedient but deep down wants to find love is introduced to several suitors. She fights with her parents, and her father is a huge, domineering jerk, and she probably has a brother who doesn’t live with them anymore but pops every so often to tell her to stop being a bad daughter, etc. I don’t want to read that story again because it lacks nuance. This book, however, has nuance, based on what I read in your review, and I’m excited to read it!

It really does have nuance, and it’s about returning to a place, moreso that just putting up with it, if you know what i mean

That’s an interesting distinction, because I’m guessing that “returning to” doesn’t just mean physically, but spiritually/emotionally.

Yes absolutely, in every sense of the word!

This sounds very powerful. I’d like to read it but might have to get myself in the right mindset first.

Yes totally, it’s a difficult one but very rewarding too

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StarTribune

Review: 'honor,' by thrity umrigar.

Thrity Umrigar's latest novel, "Honor," begins with a vacation cut short when Smita Agarwal, a foreign correspondent from Brooklyn, is forced to abandon the sunny beaches of the Maldives for an unexpected detour to bustling Mumbai. She is rushing to the bedside of her colleague Shannon Carpenter, a South Asian correspondent, who is facing imminent surgery. Before she's wheeled into the operating room, Shannon begs Smita to travel to Birwad, an all-Muslim village near the Gujarat-Maharashtra border, to report on a groundbreaking legal case in her place.

The complainant, Meena, a low-caste Hindu, goes against her community and religion to elope with her beloved, Abdul Mustafa, a Muslim. Meena's brothers, hellbent on exacting revenge on the couple for their interfaith marriage and the dishonor it has brought, set fire to the newlyweds' hut while they are inside. Abdul perishes instantly. Meena, pregnant and severely injured, barely survives. She eventually gives birth to their daughter.

Smita's hesitation to take on the assignment goes beyond her rusty Hindi and the uncharitable assumption of Mohan, Shannon's friend, who deems Smita a spoiled Indian American thumbing her nose at her country of origin. Smita's return to Mumbai triggers memories of an unspeakable act of violence and betrayal she experienced as a teenager before she and her family fled to Ohio. Though she wears her U.S. citizenship like armor, she knows spending time in a "city she'd spent the last twenty years trying to forget" will force her to confront her past.

Umrigar aptly tackles honor killings in rural India and paints Meena with agency and depth. Before her marriage to Abdul, Meena was a trailblazer who, along with her sister, defied her brothers' wishes and got a job at a sewing factory to help support their family. She believes that speaking out will empower other women who endure such horrors and that she must do her part to challenge a corrupt legal system that readily dismisses violence against women.

In her years of reporting on gender violence around the world, Smita takes care to avoid the kind of "trauma porn" typical of such articles. Curiously, in the book, Umrigar pens a gruesome scene that feels close to fetishizing female victimization. It neither fortifies the narrative nor deepens the reader's understanding of the cultural context of such violence. Less would have definitely been more.

Nevertheless, "Honor" boldly examines a system that continues to greenlight brutality and serves as a poignant reminder that despite all odds, "in every country, in every crisis, there are a handful of people who will stand against the tide."

Anjali Enjeti is the author of "Southbound: Essays on Identity, Inheritance, and Social Change" and "The Parted Earth."

Honor By: Thrity Umrigar. Publisher: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 326 pages, $26.95, in stores Jan. 11. Virtual event: In conversation with Rebecca Makkai, 7 p.m. Jan. 18, magersandquinn.com

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Honor by Thrity Umrigar

• Publication Date: October 18, 2022
• Genres: Fiction , Women's Fiction
• Paperback: 352 pages
• Publisher: Algonquin Books
• ISBN-10: 1643753304
• ISBN-13: 9781643753300
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Honor Hardcover – January 4, 2022

Purchase options and add-ons.

• Print length 336 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Algonquin Books
• Publication date January 4, 2022
• Dimensions 6.33 x 1.25 x 9.33 inches
• ISBN-10 161620995X
• ISBN-13 978-1616209957
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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Algonquin Books; First Edition (January 4, 2022)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 336 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 161620995X
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1616209957
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.08 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.33 x 1.25 x 9.33 inches
• #1,310 in Cultural Heritage Fiction
• #5,358 in Family Life Fiction (Books)
• #6,022 in Women's Domestic Life Fiction

About the author

Thrity umrigar.

Thrity Umrigar is the best-selling author of nine novels, including Honor, Bombay Time, The Space Between Us, The Secrets Between Us, If Today Be Sweet, The Weight of Heaven, The World We Found and The Story Hour. She is also the author of the memoir, First Darling of the Morning and three picture books for kids--When I Carried You in My Belly, Binny's Diwali and Sugar in Milk. Honor is a Reese Book Club pick. Her books have been translated into several languages and published in over fifteen countries. She is a Distinguished University Professor of English at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland.

The Space Between Us was a finalist for the PEN/Beyond Margins award, while her memoir was a finalist for the Society of Midland Authors award. If Today Be Sweet was a Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle selection, while her other books have been Community Reads selections. Thrity is the winner of the Cleveland Arts Prize, a Lambda Literary award and the Seth Rosenberg prize.

Thrity was born in Bombay, India and came to the U.S. when she was 21. As a Parsi child attending a Catholic school in a predominantly Hindu country, she had the kind of schizophrenic and cosmopolitan childhood that has served her well in her life as a writer. Accused by teachers and parents alike of being a daydreaming, head-in-the-clouds child, she grew up lost in the fictional worlds created by Steinbeck, Hemingway, Woolf and Faulkner. She would emerge long enough from these books to create her own fictional and poetic worlds. Encouraged by her practical-minded parents to get an undergraduate degree in business, Thrity survived business school by creating a drama club and writing, directing and acting in plays. Her first short stories, essays and poems were published in national magazines and newspapers in India at age fifteen.

After earning a M.A. in journalism in the U.S., Thrity worked for several years as an award-winning reporter, columnist and magazine writer. She also earned a Ph.D. in English. In 1999, Thrity won a one-year Nieman Fellowship to Harvard University, which is given to mid-career journalists.

While at Harvard, Thrity wrote her first novel, Bombay Time. In 2002 she accepted a teaching position at Case Western Reserve University She also does occasional freelance pieces for national publications and has written for the New York Times and the Washington Post's and the Boston Globe's book pages.

Thrity is active on the national lecture circuit and has spoken at book festivals such as the L.A. Festival of Books, the Tuscon Book Festival and the Miami Book Fair International; at universities such as MIT, Harvard University, and Spelman College; and before literary societies, civic and business organizations and public libraries all across the country.

Find out more about Thrity's books go to www.umrigar.com or to Thrity's author page on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/Thrity-Umrigar-21555987101/

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In the Eyes of Others

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By Jonathan Haidt

• Oct. 22, 2010

Western societies got weird in the 19th century. I mean that not as an insult but as an acronym. The cultural psychologists Joe Henrich, Steve Heine and Ara Norenzayan recently showed that many psychological processes work differently in people raised in Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic (WEIRD) societies. The normal, or default, mode of human cognition, for example, is holistic, given to seeing relationships among elements, but people in WEIRD societies think more analytically. They see a world full of discrete objects, like balls on a billiard table, whose properties are best analyzed individually.

The WEIRDing process has been particularly visible in moral philosophy. In his 2008 book “Experiments in Ethics,” the Princeton philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah described the loss of relevance that philosophers inflicted on themselves, beginning in the late 19th century, when they abandoned philosophy’s ancient interest in messy human nature and retreated into the conceptual analysis of moral terms.

Appiah is one of the most relevant philosophers today. He writes about ethics in diverse modern societies, where it is often a challenge to find solid ground, let alone common ground. His work reveals the heart and sensitivity of a novelist — or perhaps a mystery writer, given that he’s written three whodunits — and he develops ideas the way a writer develops characters. He shows them in action, in relationships, in context and in flux. He helps us think holistically before turning analytic.

In “The Honor Code,” we accompany Detective Appiah as he tries to figure out who killed three morally repugnant practices: dueling among British gentlemen, foot-binding among the Chinese elite and slavery in the British Empire. In each case he shows how notions of honor sustained the practice for centuries, and how (spoiler alert) it was honor that later killed the practice in just a few decades, making these cases the “moral revolutions” referred to in his subtitle. Appiah also presents a fourth case: honor killings in present-day Pakistan, in which women and girls who are thought to have had sex outside of marriage, even in cases of rape, are murdered by male relatives to preserve the family’s “honor.” In this case the revolution has not yet happened, but Appiah draws on the other three cases to suggest how this horrific practice might someday meet its end.

Take the practice of foot-binding. Nobody knows precisely why aristocratic Chinese parents began, more than 800 years ago, to change the shape of their daughters’ feet. But once tiny, pointed feet became a difficult-to-attain ideal of feminine beauty, an obstacle to infidelity and a mark of elevated social status, there was no way for parents in the upper social strata to abandon the practice without losing honor — and reducing their daughters’ marriage prospects. Honor overpowered compassion: silk straps were used to pull up the middle third of the foot, like an inchworm, gradually bringing the ball of the foot and the heel together over many years. Even a poet who found such feet erotic wrote, “ Can’t bear to hear — the cries of a young girl as her feet are bound for the first time.”

As Christian missionaries spread throughout China in the late 19th century, they were appalled by the practice and formed societies opposed to foot-binding. Allied with members of the Chinese literati, they made arguments that appealed to China’s national interest, like the need for strong and healthy women to bear strong and healthy children. Yet these arguments had no effect on the practice until members of the elite class discovered that they and their nation had become objects of ridicule. Foreigners were taking pictures of women’s tiny feet and sending them around the world. Combined with the shame of recent military and commercial defeats at the hands of Japan, Britain and other foreign powers, the thirst to restore national honor created an opening. The anti-foot-binding ­societies recruited high-ranking families to make a dual pledge: to refrain from binding their daughters’ feet, and from marrying their sons to women with bound feet. With ­upper-class boys growing up ready to marry a new pool of upper-class, unbound girls, there was now an honorable alternative, and the practice essentially disappeared within a generation.

I have just one criticism of this fascinating, erudite and beautifully written book: Appiah thinks honor survives in WEIRD societies. He distinguishes “competitive honor,” which accrues to people who excel, from “peer honor,” which governs relationships among members of an “honor world” who acknowledge a shared code. Appiah is certainly right that people in modern societies seek competitive honor — earning the highest grade or largest bonus, for example — but this pursuit often motivates unethical behavior, and so this is not the kind of honor that most interests him. Rather, he believes that we moderns have retained a form of peer honor, stripped of gender and re-engineered for a large and diverse society whose moral triumph has been the extension of dignity to all. “Honor is no decaying vestige of a premodern order,” he writes. “It is, for us, what it has always been, an engine, fueled by the dialogue between our self-­conceptions and the regard of others, that can drive us to take seriously our responsibilities in a world we share.”

Yet by Appiah’s own analysis, peer honor can survive only in an “honor world,” and that is precisely the kind of world that WEIRD societies asphyxiate. At the University of Virginia, for example, we have a student-run honor system, created in 1842 by a few hundred sons of Virginia planters whose families vigilantly tracked one another’s reputations and arranged marital and commercial alliances accordingly. In that world, a gentleman could not tolerate a stain upon his honor, and neither could a community of gentlemen. We therefore have a “single sanction” based on a psychology of purity: any dishonorable behavior contaminates the whole community, so any violation of the honor code is punishable by expulsion.

Today, however, the university’s 21,000 students come from all over the world, and concerns about purity are mostly confined to the cafeteria. The moral domain has shrunk — as it must to accommodate the individualism, mobility and diversity of a WEIRD society — to its bare minimum: don’t hurt people, treat them fairly but otherwise leave them alone. Students at Virginia work hard and care about their grades, but when they learn about fellow students’ cheating, they usually do nothing. They understand that cheating harms others (in courses graded on a curve), but because WEIRD moral calculus involves only individuals (not the honor of the group), they feel that expulsion is too harsh a punishment. And because they do not feel personally dishonored by a cheater, it’s not clear to them why they should step forward and press charges. The result is that our purity-based single sanction, still in force long after the death of its natal honor world, increases students’ willingness to tolerate dishonorable behavior.

A more accurate subtitle for “The Honor Code” might have been: “How Moral Revolutions Used to Happen, and What We Gained (and Lost) When We Replaced Peer Honor With Respect for All Persons.” That subtitle would have made it clear that Detective Appiah is really working on the hardest case of all: Who are we, morally speaking, and how did we get here?

THE HONOR CODE

How moral revolutions happen.

By Kwame Anthony Appiah

264 pp. W. W. Norton & Company. $25.95

Jonathan Haidt, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, is the author of “The Happiness Hypothesis.” He is currently writing “The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion.”

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Honor MagicBook X14 Pro (2024) Review: A competent mid-range laptop

The honor magicbook x14 pro features an aluminium body that makes it look and feel like a macbook air, but how does it fare in the performance and battery department here's my take on honor's latest mid-range laptop..

Honor’s MagicBook series has made a name for itself in the mid-range laptop segment, offering a combination of performance and battery life. The company’s latest model features a 13th Gen Intel processor packed into a lightweight chassis that looks and feels like you are holding a MacBook Air. I used the Honor MagicBook X14 Pro (2024) for a few weeks, and here’s what I liked and didn’t like about the laptop.

Design and Display

The Honor MagicBook X14 Pro has an aluminium unibody that resembles a MacBook Air. It has a nice matte finish that isn’t susceptible to fingerprints, but I noticed that it sometimes picked up smudges, especially when I placed my smartwatch or phone on top of it. However, it was not a problem since I could just wipe them away using a cloth or my palm.

The laptop weighs 1.4kg, which is a few more grams than the latest MacBook Air, but Honor has managed to distribute the weight fairly well. In the past, I have used numerous bulky laptops, so if you are someone who commutes with their laptop on their back, the MagicBook X14 Pro is an easy recommendation since it won’t add stress to your back and make your arms feel tired when you are carrying it from one room to another.

It sports a 14-inch screen with a resolution of 1900 x 1200. The display has a refresh rate of 60Hz, which is adequate if you want to browse the internet or just watch your favorite web series. Honor says the display has a peak brightness of 300 nits. While the screen is bright enough for indoor usage, if you are thinking of using this laptop on a bright day under direct sunlight, be ready to get disappointed as you will barely be able to see anything on the screen.

One thing I did not like about the laptop is the keyboard. I am used to a mechanical keyboard, so switching to a laptop was hard for me. While I can manage with a membrane keyboard, the MagicBook X14 Pro’s keys felt cramped and I found myself repeatedly pressing the wrong buttons more than I normally would.

But I wouldn’t blame Honor here, since this is the case with most laptops. If you are using a desktop or a full-fledged keyboard, getting used to a slightly smaller layout might take some time as your hands get used to the laptop.

Performance

The Honor MagicBook X14 Pro is powered by the Intel Core i5-13420H processor and paired with 8GB of RAM, which may or may not be enough depending on what you do. My typical day involves typing for hours on end, opening a ton of browser tabs, browsing mindlessly, listening to music in the background, and watching a web series or anime at night.

If you are in the same boat as me and are looking to buy a laptop for productivity purposes, the Honor MagicBook X14 Pro will easily breeze through everyday tasks. However, if you are into video editing, the laptop might struggle as it does not feature a dedicated graphics card. Honor has also added a performance mode, which can be easily activated using the “Fn+P” shortcut. While I did not notice the difference in everyday usage, the company says the laptop bumps up the power by a bit and consumes more battery when performance mode is enabled.

The laptop also comes with a fingerprint scanner embedded in the power button on the top right. This is the first time I am using a laptop with a fingerprint scanner and I personally thought it wouldn’t be that useful. But never have I been more wrong. The fingerprint scanner works without a hitch, and I have been enjoying the convenience it offers by letting me sign in directly to my Microsoft account without having to type in the password.

The Honor MagicBook X14 Pro packs a 60Wh battery that supports 65W fast charging. While the majority of laptops offer up to 4 hours of battery life, this laptop lasted anywhere between 6-7 hours depending on my usage. I watched Vinland Saga for almost 4 hours with brightness set to around 50-60 per cent, and the battery dipped from 100 to 53 per cent.

I used the laptop to work all day on a Sunday and at the end of my work shift, which typically lasts for around 8 hours, I was left with around a 10 per cent charge. This is really impressive as other laptops in the price segment often go dark after 3 or 4 hours. With the company’s 65W fast charging, the Honor MagicBook X14 Pro takes anywhere between 90-120 minutes to fully charge but may take longer if you are using the laptop while plugged in.

Should you buy the Honor MagicBook X14 Pro?

At a starting price of Rs. 54,490, the Honor MagicBook X14 Pro offers great value for money if you are looking for a lightweight laptop that offers lag-free performance, solid build quality, and a long-lasting battery that will easily last you for hours. However, those looking for a powerhouse to play games on and a screen that is visible outdoors should look elsewhere.

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ROH Supercard of Honor 2024 (April 5) Results & Review

Posted by Sean Sedor | Apr 7, 2024 | Featured , Reviews , Ring of Honor , WrestleMania Weekend , WrestleMania Weekend 2024

Ring Of Honor Supercard Of Honor 2024 April 5, 2024 Liacouras Center Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Watch: HonorClub ; YouTube (Zero Hour)

Before I kick off this review, I just want to note that I did see this show live in-person at the Liacouras Center. It was my first time seeing a show in this building (this is the venue that AEW regularly runs in Philadelphia), and it was fourth show I had attended over the course of two days in Philadelphia, as I had already been to DEFY, STARDOM, and the WrestleCon SuperShow on Thursday. My seat provided me with a pretty good view, and I loved the fact that I was able to get some Chickie’s & Pete’s Crab Fries and Cheese Sauce (they absolutely rock if you’ve never had them). I haven’t gone back to watch the show on Honor Club to see how it came off, so when it comes to my thoughts on all of these matches, they’re strictly from an in-person perspective.

The Premiere Athletes (Ariya Daivari, Josh Woods, & Tony Nese) (with Mark Sterling) def. Adam Priest, Rhett Titus, & Tony Deppen

Starting things off on the Zero Hour was a Six-Man Tag that saw The Premiere Athletes pick up a victory over two former ROH World Television Champions (Rhett Titus and Tony Deppen) and current indie standout Adam Priest. This was a perfectly solid trios contest and honestly…I don’t have much else to say about the match itself. I suppose this could be setting up The Premiere Athletes for a shot at the ROH World Six-Man Tag Team Titles, but given that a heel team are the current title holders (Bullet Club Gold, who haven’t even appeared in ROH since winning those titles), I don’t foresee that happening. If you missed the pre-show, you’re not missing anything if you skip this match. ***

Nuked from orbit. It's the only way to be sure! @WoodsIsTheGoods @TonyNese @AriyaDaivari #ROHSupercardOfHonor #ZeroHour #HonorClub ➡️ https://t.co/uYI1gFmowH ➡️ https://t.co/uyBqmqjjxA pic.twitter.com/8ZHq8QrEr3 — TDE Wrestling (@tde_gif) April 5, 2024

The Beast Mortos def. Blake Christian

So because AAA owns the rights to his name, the luchador formerly known as Black Taurus won’t be allowed to be billed as that going forward in ROH (I’m not sure if that’s the case for everyone outside of AAA, or just in the United States, or what the actual specifics are). He’s now going as The Beast Mortos, and in his first ROH appearance since Final Battle 2023, he scored a win over Blake Christian in what was a very entertaining contest. Some really solid action throughout, and while Christian definitely had various moments to shine, Beast Mortos (going to take time to get used to that one) was the main focus here, and he looked good doing all of his usual spots. This isn’t a match you need to go out of your way to see, but it was easily the best match on Zero Hour, and definitely better than some of the matches we got on the PPV. ***1/2

Good night! @Taurusoriginal #ROHSupercardOfHonor #ZeroHour #HonorClub ➡️ https://t.co/uYI1gFmowH ➡️ https://t.co/uyBqmqjjxA pic.twitter.com/mWI9PjbWh9 — TDE Wrestling (@tde_gif) April 5, 2024

Cole Karter & Griff Garrison (with Maria Kanellis) def. Spanish Announce Project (Angelico & Serpentico)

Angelico and Serpentico were looking for some payback after the trio of Cole Karter, Griff Garrison, and Maria Kanellis stole Serpentico’s mask. Unfortunately, things didn’t exactly go their way here. The heels jumped them during their entrance (which led to the remnants of Serpentico’s streamers being stuck in the ring for most of the match), and while Spanish Announce Project did fight back, they ultimately came up short after the heels once again ripped off Serpentico’s mask and stole the pin. This was about as average as it gets. I don’t have any issues with little undercard feuds like this (and Zero Hour is a perfect spot for a match like this), but I really don’t see anything in this Cole Karter/Griff Garrison tag team. There’s just no juice there whatsoever. I’m sure we’re building to Serpentico getting some revenge at some point, so there’s that to look forward to. An ok match, but super forgettable outside of the finish. **1/2

UNCOOL. #ROHSupercardOfHonor #ZeroHour #HonorClub ➡️ https://t.co/uYI1gFmWmf ➡️ https://t.co/uyBqmqjRn8 pic.twitter.com/DAS39cSgyw — TDE Wrestling (@tde_gif) April 5, 2024

Mariah May def. Momo Kohgo

After wearing her normal gear for her match on the STARDOM show on Thursday, Mariah May is back to her Toni Storm attire as she took on Momo Kohgo in the final bout on Zero Hour. Mariah would score the victory in what was a very solid contest that went just over six minutes. This weekend was the first time I had seen Momo Kohgo in action and, based on what I saw (both here and at the STARDOM show), I came away impressed with her for sure. There was some good back-and-forth action between the two before Mariah ultimately put Momo away. Not a match that was super outstanding by any means, but if you’re curious to see another match involving STARDOM talent on this card, I’d say it’s a quick and easy watch. I would also say that this was another match on Zero Hour (along with Beast Mortos vs. Blake Christian, which I mentioned earlier) that was better than a number of matches on the actual PPV. ***1/4

Diabolical! #ROHSupercardOfHonor #ZeroHour #HonorClub ➡️ https://t.co/uYI1gFmowH ➡️ https://t.co/uyBqmqjjxA pic.twitter.com/kimW2JNCcf — TDE Wrestling (@tde_gif) April 5, 2024

ROH World Television Title – Kyle Fletcher © def. Lee Johnson

The PPV proper kicked off with the ROH World Television Title bout, as Kyle Fletcher defended against Lee Johnson, who (as I mentioned in the preview I wrote for this PPV) had been on a several match winning streak coming into this show. Now on paper, I knew this match had the potential to be really good, but when the dust settled, this far surpassed my expectations. This was an excelling opening contest that (in terms of the stuff I had seen in-person up to this point) was easily the leading contender for match of the weekend. The tone for this bout was set pretty quickly as Fletcher gave Johnson a freaking brainbuster onto the barricade within the first few minutes. From there, this match was just packed with awesome back-and-forth action that saw both men bust out some major moves as they tried to put each other away.

THIS MATCH RULES!! @BigShottyLee @kylefletcherpro #ROHSupercardOfHonor #HonorClub ➡️ https://t.co/uyBqmqjjxA pic.twitter.com/0vPlRP3Krq — TDE Wrestling (@tde_gif) April 6, 2024

Johnson seemed to survive everything Fletcher could throw at him, and came close to winning on a few occasions. The closest Johnson came to capturing the title occurred after a Canadian Destroyer off the top rope, followed by a pair of frog splashes that got a super close nearfall. Ultimately, Fletcher was able to survive the best Johnson could throw at him, and finally managed to put him away after connecting with the El Generico Top Rope Brainbuster (the move of the weekend apparently). An absolutely incredible match from start to finish. Fletcher continues to show why he’s well on his way (as he gets more and more experience) to being one of the best wrestlers in the world, while Johnson had what was easily the best outing of his career to date. Your WrestleMania Weekend viewing won’t be complete without seeing this match. ****1/2

. @BigShottyLee DESTROYER!! #ROHSupercardOfHonor #HonorClub ➡️ https://t.co/uyBqmqjjxA pic.twitter.com/n5xSxAQEX3 — TDE Wrestling (@tde_gif) April 6, 2024

STARDOM Showcase – Mei Seira & Empress Nexus Venus (Mina Shirakawa & Maika) def. Tam Nakano & Queen’s Quest (Saya Kamitani & AZM)

Up next on the card was the STARDOM showcase, which everyone in my section seemed pretty excited about. The match lasted just under fifteen minutes, and ended when Mina Shirakawa put away Saya Kamitani with one of her finishers. In hindsight, I should’ve seen that Mina was going to get the win here. Not only was she the first STARDOM talent in AEW/ROH since the recent STARDOM exodus, but the angle from the STARDOM show the night before with Toni Storm should’ve been a tipoff. While this wasn’t the great match that some people thought it could’ve been, I thought it was still a very entertaining bout on the whole. There was really good action right from the opening bell, and all six women had various moments to shine. The closing few minutes were particularly strong, before the last sequence between Mina Shirakawa and Saya Kamitani that led to the finish. I had seen all six of these women at the STARDOM show on Thursday, so I sort of knew what to expect here, but for anyone in the crowd that hadn’t seen any of these women live before, I think they came away liking what they saw. I’m not sure if it was enough to get these people to become regular watchers of STARDOM, but still, the match was very entertaining for what it was. ***1/2

. @MinaShirakawa RULES! #ROHSupercardOfHonor #STARDOM #HonorClub ➡️ https://t.co/uyBqmqjjxA pic.twitter.com/Mgsmx3CHAq — TDE Wrestling (@tde_gif) April 6, 2024

Following the match, Mariah May came out, and after it looked like she might attack her former Club Venus stablemate, the two embraced, and Mariah shared champagne with Mina and the rest of the winning team. On the STARDOM show, they clearly teased a future match between Toni Storm and Mina Shirakawa with Mariah May stuck in the middle. Will the relationship that Mariah has with Mina finally give us the beginning of the rift between Mariah and Toni, or will Mariah ultimately side with Toni when that match with Toni and Mini eventually happens? My hope is that they don’t drag out the eventual Mariah turn, but I guess time will tell on that one.

🍾 @MariahMayx @MinaShirakawa @_Maika0324 @mei_10311031 🥂 #ROHSupercardOfHonor #STARDOM #HonorClub ➡️ https://t.co/uyBqmqjjxA pic.twitter.com/LsTtEs8Exm — TDE Wrestling (@tde_gif) April 6, 2024

ROH World Tag Team Titles – Undisputed Kingdom (Matt Taven & Mike Bennett) © def. The Infantry (Carlie Bravo & Shawn Dean) (with Trish Adora)

The Infantry earned this title shot by going to a Time Limit Draw with Undisputed Kingdom on the final episode of ROH television before the PPV, so a hastily put together title match in that regard. Early on in the bout, a table was set up by the entranceway (it was the elevated ramp that goes straight to the ring instead of the traditional ramp), and that table would come into play in the closing stages of the match, as Carlie Bravo put Matt Taven through the table with a running splash off the ramp. As the referee went to check on Bravo and Taven on the floor, Wardlow ran in and just destroyed Shawn Dean with a clothesline. Mike Bennett then took advance and covered Dean as the referee returned to the ring, and got the pin. Undisputed Kingdom retained the ROH World Tag Team Titles with Wardlow’s help.

. @CarlieBravo incoming! #ROHSupercardOfHonor #HonorClub ➡️ https://t.co/uyBqmqjjxA pic.twitter.com/h5pJJlwFOx — TDE Wrestling (@tde_gif) April 6, 2024

This was a decent match, but not much more than that. The action throughout was fine enough, and while it definitely picked up a bit in the closing few minutes, it never crossed over into the territory where I could call it a good match. Part of the issue for me is that I’m just not that invested in The Infantry right now. It’s not that I don’t think they’re solid in-ring talents, because they are. They just haven’t reached that point with me in terms of being a credible tag team that can hang with the bigger names in the current AEW/ROH tag team divisions (they had a good match with FTR, but the match against House Of Black didn’t exactly leave a great first impression). I totally respect the attempt to elevate a fresh act, but they’re just not there yet. Another issue with this match was the length. Nearly fourteen minutes is entirely too long for a match at this point in the card, and one involving an act that isn’t totally over with the audience yet. This was by no means a horrible bout. However, it wasn’t that memorable outside of the table spot and Wardlow’s interference at the end. **3/4

ROH Women’s World Television Title Tournament Final – Billie Starkz def. Queen Aminata

I mentioned this in the PPV preview I did for the site, but this was one of the matches I was looking forward to the most on this show, solely from the standpoint that the result was unpredictable. Given the ongoing storyline that Billy Starkz is in with Athena, and the focus that Queen Aminata has gotten this year, this one could’ve gone either way.

Up until the finish, I thought this had been a very solid match, with good action and a crowd that actually seemed pretty invested at points (I was honestly shocked that we got loud dueling chants for these two). I’ve seen Billie Starkz live before, so I pretty much knew what to expect from her. However, this was my first time seeing Queen Aminata in-person. Even though I had seen her plenty of times on AEW television, it wasn’t until I saw her live that it finally clicked with me. I now totally get why people are high on her and the potential she has. In particular, I thought some of her running kicks while Billie was up against the ropes were absolutely brutal in the best way possible.

ONE AND ONLY. @amisylle #ROHSupercardOfHonor #HonorClub ➡️ https://t.co/uyBqmqjjxA pic.twitter.com/epNEdAl9gI — TDE Wrestling (@tde_gif) April 6, 2024

Of course, what everyone is going to be talking about here is the finish. Billie went for a Swanton Bomb in the ring, but Aminata got her knees up. The doctors soon got in the ring as Billie screamed in pain, complaining that she couldn’t get up. Now while the crowd did go quiet here, pretty much everyone sitting around me figured almost immediately that this was likely a work. Sure enough, we were proven right, and when Billie finally went on the attack, the crowd exploded. A German Suplex and one choke hold later, Billie Starkz was the first-ever ROH Women’s World Television Champion.

. @BillieStarkz BY ANY MEANS NECESSARY!! #ROHSupercardOfHonor #HonorClub ➡️ https://t.co/uyBqmqjjxA pic.twitter.com/34lrfWcXdc — TDE Wrestling (@tde_gif) April 6, 2024

To say this finish is controversial would be an understatement. A big issue with doing this kind of finish is that we know that if someone is actually hurt in a wrestling match these days, they either go right to a finish (as was seen with the recent match on AEW Collision with Ricky Starks and Top Flight), or the match is called off. The fact that they didn’t call the match off at all immediately signaled that this was not a real injury. As it pertains to the actual storyline, I don’t have any issues with telling the story that Billie is finally taking on the heelish influence of Athena, but that story could’ve been told in so many better ways that don’t come off as fake and silly as this one. Just off the top of my head, I remember the Johnny Gargano heel turn in Dragon Gate USA from 2013 during WrestleMania Weekend where (in a move of desperation) he used a string to choke out Shingo and retain the DGUSA Open The Freedom Gate Title. Simple cheating would’ve been a much more effective way to tell this story than a convoluted fake injury angle. At the same time, as I mentioned, Billie revealing the injury was fake got BY FAR the biggest pop of the entire match, so what do I know? I would still consider this a good match, but it was definitely taken down a bit by the finish. ***1/4

ROH World Six-Man Tag Team Titles – Bullet Club Gold (“Switchblade” Jay White, Austin Gunn, & Colten Gunn © def. Monster Sauce (Alex Zayne & Lance Archer) & Minoru Suzuki

So Bullet Club Gold won the ROH World Six-Man Tag Team Titles back on the January 17th edition of AEW Dynamite. This Open Challenge is not only the first time that Bullet Club Gold has appeared in ROH since they won the titles, but it’s also their first title defense period. That’s right. They won these titles nearly three months ago, and they’re only just defending them now. I understand that they were involved in that storyline with The Acclaimed, but that is just asinine.

After Jay White cut a promo, Lance Archer and Alex Zayne came out to answer the challenge, and Archer talked about how he formed a tag team with Alex Zayne in New Japan called Monster Sauce. He then introduced their third man for tonight…Minoru Suzuki (who’s fresh off his match from Joey Janela’s Spring Break, which was running at the same time as this PPV), who got a huge pop when he came out. I know a lot has been said about Suzuki and how his style of matches have gotten stale (particularly in these appearances in the United States), but the guy is still incredibly over with these crowds. Plus, I feel like matches such as this can help better hide Suzuki in some respects, where you can get him in spurts, and the match isn’t totally reliant on him.

Too saucy! @AlexZayneSauce #ROHSupercardOfHonor #HonorClub ➡️ https://t.co/uyBqmqjjxA pic.twitter.com/QrK5VACwsK — TDE Wrestling (@tde_gif) April 6, 2024

The match itself was perfectly solid for what it was. Archer, Suzuki, and Zayne all had moments to shine before White eventually pinned Zayne with the Blade Runner. You probably could’ve shaved two or three minutes off of this, but beyond that, I don’t have a ton of complaints about this one. Afterwards, The Acclaimed’s music hit, and they came through the crowd and attacked Bullet Club Gold from behind. Despite getting the jump on Bullet Club Gold, The Acclaimed were the ones that got the worst of it, as Bowens got laid out with a Blade Runner. In a quick live note, Billy Gunn grabbed the mic and it looked like he was going to cut a promo, but the arena immediately went to black as they started airing the video package for the next match. He looked pretty annoyed, but thankfully that video package saved us from a Billy Gunn promo. ***1/4

Fight Without Honor – Dalton Castle def. Johnny TV (with Taya Valkyrie)

At this point in the show, it was starting to get late (in my case, I was being picked up by my father right after the show, and we had a two hour road trip home ahead of us), and while I knew that a Fight Without Honor was going to require a decent amount of time, I was hopeful that it wouldn’t last too long. Boy was I wrong.

I’m not going to go into painstaking detail about this one, because the sooner I can forget that this match even happened, the better. It was entirely too long (it did not need twenty two minutes), and really had no redeeming qualities to it whatsoever. It was about as mid of a hardcore match as you’ll ever see (aside from the thumbtacks at the end, you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between this and a standard WWE hardcore match), and it just absolutely died the longer it went. A leaf blower was even used as a serious weapon at one point. Eventually, Castle did the spot where he threw his boys as his opponent, and all of the replaceable boys (not The Tate Twins, who were part of the recent AEW releases) came out for Castle to throw at Johnny TV. This all led to a moment where a giant fat boy just fell flat on his face when Castle tried to throw him at Johnny TV (that pretty much sums up the entire match, to be honest). A boy who was very obviously Jack Cartwheel then came cartwheeling down the ramp and connected with a big dive to the floor.

…Oh, Boy. #ROHSupercardOfHonor #HonorClub ➡️ https://t.co/uyBqmqjjxA pic.twitter.com/MVESVIfq6s — TDE Wrestling (@tde_gif) April 6, 2024

The finish saw yet another boy, who was clearly Paul Walter Houser, come out and meander in the ring for what felt like an eternity (to the point where I thought he came out WAY too early) before he helped Castle set up a pile of thumbtacks for the finish. I knew it was Paul Walter Houser straight away (mainly because I saw the first few minutes of match with Sami Callihan the night before at the WrestleCon SuperShow), but nobody else in the crowd had any idea who this guy even was. I understand he’s an actor who’s won a fair amount of awards in the last few years for some of his work (and someone who is a big wrestling fan), but this man is NOT famous in the eyes of the populace at large. The average person on the street would not be able to pick this man out of a lineup, so expecting his reveal to get a pop was wishful thinking at best. Castle finally pinned Johnny TV to end what was one of the worst Fight Without Honors in the history of the company. An absolute waste of everyone’s time, and one of the worst matches of the weekend without question. *

ROH Women’s World Title – Athena © def. Hikaru Shida

Athena had a special entrance where she came out dressed as a character from a video game called Baldur’s Gate 3. I’ve never heard of it, but given that it’s a role playing game, I imagine it’s something that’s right up her alley. Some people will find this entrance stupid, but eh…I didn’t mind it. Let people do what they want for their special entrances.

🅾️ FACE! @AthenaPalmer_FG #ROHSupercardOfHonor #HonorClub ➡️ https://t.co/uyBqmqjjxA pic.twitter.com/FjwJTPOcbt — TDE Wrestling (@tde_gif) April 6, 2024

There were a number of matches on this show that were much longer than they needed to be. The previous bout with Dalton Castle and Johnny TV was the most egregious example by far, but this match wasn’t that far behind. I’ve been a fan of Hikaru Shida ever since she came to AEW in 2019, and in general I feel Athena has delivered in most of her big title defenses. While they ultimately had a very good match here, the time it got and its placement on the show were major detriments. The crowd was not that into the first portion of this match, but they absolutely got them back once they started to get into that next gear, so credit to the both of them in that regard. If you chop off the first seven or eight minutes, this match improves drastically (especially since the second half of the match was actually really strong, and had a lot of good action that the crowd was into).

HOLY @shidahikaru !! #ROHSupercardOfHonor #HonorClub ➡️ https://t.co/uyBqmqjjxA pic.twitter.com/ID3dNvJkJe — TDE Wrestling (@tde_gif) April 6, 2024

The placement of this match on the card didn’t help them out either. This show was already running long, and it didn’t need another twenty plus minute match. The two would trade finishers before Athena finally put Shida away with a second O-Face to retain her title. I felt this had the potential to be a great match, and even though this definitely had elements of a great match in there (particularly in the closing stages), the factors I mentioned earlier worked against it in a major way. ***3/4

ROH World Title – Mark Briscoe def. Eddie Kingston ©

Part of me was hoping that Tony Khan would be able to get Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Gimme Back My Bullets” for Mark Briscoe’s entrance here, and sure enough, he managed to pull it off. I didn’t start watching ROH until the HDNet Era, so I never got to see The Briscoes come out to this song in real time (they had moved on to different entrance music by the time I started going to ROH events). This made me so happy and, for the most part, made up for the fact that the show was running long.

The PPV had started off hot with an incredible opener, but we hadn’t gotten a great match since then. Especially given how long the show had been at this point, we really needed a strong match to close things out on a high note. Fortunately, Eddie Kingston and Mark Briscoe delivered, as they gave us a great main event. It was an absolute slugfest from start to finish that saw Mark get busted open very early on. Despite the bloodloss, as well as some of the crazy bumps he took at the hands of Kingston (which included an exploder off the ring apron to the floor), Mark continued to fight on.

. @SussexCoChicken dropping that FROGGY BOW! #ROHSupercardOfHonor #HonorClub ➡️ https://t.co/uyBqmqjjxA pic.twitter.com/Lt3KUki4E8 — TDE Wrestling (@tde_gif) April 6, 2024

After more back-and-forth action, Mark lifted Kingston up for an attempted Cutthroat Driver that ended up being more like an Angle Slam (Kingston was probably a little too heavy for Mark to lift at that point, but it still sort-of worked in the sense that it could be easily be sold as Mark being exhausted…plus it still looked like he hit an actual move). Then, with his family at ringside, Mark finally connected with the Jay Driller, and scored the pin to capture the ROH World Title. Streamers flew into the ring, and Mark celebrated with his family and other members of the ROH locker room as the show came to a close. Eleven years to the day that Jay Briscoe won his first ROH World Title, his younger brother was finally a World Champion.

Honor is Real. #ROHSupercardOfHonor #HonorClub ➡️ https://t.co/uyBqmqjjxA pic.twitter.com/U4Uw7ttITS — TDE Wrestling (@tde_gif) April 6, 2024

Again, the match itself was fantastic. These two absolutely beat the crap out of each other, and they definitely managed to end the show on a high note after a fair amount of the stuff on the undercard didn’t exactly land. I can definitely understand some of the complaints about how we got to this point. Would it have been better had Mark gone through a more obvious and built-up chase, against (perhaps) a heel champion? Yeah, that’s a fair critique. Was this main event hurt by the fact that it felt thrown together? Yes. Those are all valid points to be sure, and I do believe they could’ve better maximized the chase and eventual title win for Mark. All that being said though, the match still delivered in a big way when it happened, and as a longtime ROH fan, it was incredibly cool to see this moment live. ****1/2

Final Thoughts

While it was certainly far from a bad show, Supercard of Honor 2024 was easily the weakest PPV that we’ve gotten in the Tony Khan era of ROH. The show did start and finish with two of the best matches of the entire weekend, but most of the stuff we got in between definitely dragged the show down. Aside from the STARDOM Showcase (which I felt worked well for what it was), everything in the middle portion of the show had either one or multiple issues. The common theme with all of them was that a lot of those matches were too long. I understand that being on HonorClub allows you to go longer since you’re not restricted by a PPV window. However, I feel that a number of these matches suffered from the fact that they were too long, and would have benefited greatly if several minutes were shaved off (Athena vs. Hikaru Shida was the biggest victim in that regard). You easily could’ve fit this show in at three hours on the dot. I would absolutely avoid watching Dalton Castle vs. Johnny TV at all costs, but that was the only match on the show that was outright bad. Definitely watch the opener and the main event, and the STARDOM match if you’re interested in that. Beyond those three, if you’re pressed for time, I can’t say you need to see anything else.

About The Author

Recent graduate of Penn State University, and a fan of this crazy world of pro-wrestling since 2004.

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