Review: “The Goddess Complex” by Sanjena Sathian

April 26, 2026

Review: “The Goddess Complex” by Sanjena Sathian

🚼 TGC fights against the belief that life revolves around women neatly checking off a “mortgage, marriage, and motherhood”. In that order. It’s part satire, part psychological thriller, with catty mom groups, pregnancy influencers, fertility self-help cults, and a slew of internet experts tossed in for good measure.

🚼 TGC has 2 distinct halves; I’m not sure if this tonal “break” is intentional or not. The first consists of struggling PhD candidate Sanjana, reaching a turning point in which she makes several bold decisions and takes control of her destiny only to be met by shocked family that can’t make sense of her choices. Mainly, they don’t understand how she can’t want a child. Sathian draws a distinction in her commentary about how society tends to treat women who choose not to have children versus women who are unable to have children. I enjoyed the first half of TGC quite a bit.

I’ll confess the second half lost me and I wish it had continued more in the vein of the first.

🚼 The second half takes a major left turn into psychological thriller-land. Sanjana finds herself on an unwelcome journey to India to track down her ex-husband. The sudden, unplanned change in setting mirrors the change in tone. So maybe it was a very deliberate shift on Sathian’s part. In hindsight, perhaps the Daphne Du Maurier quote at the beginning foreshadowed her intention? But to me, the tonal shift came out of nowhere and felt very abrupt.

I was a little lost at times between the names and motivations; at the end the actions were still nefarious no matter how desires could be understood. I’m being oblique here because I don’t want to spoil anything for anyone!