Rupi Kaur's follow-up to Milk and Honey landed in the top ten of the New York Times Best Sellers list within its first two weeks and has since gathered roughly 388,800 Goodreads ratings, cementing her as one of the most commercially successful poets working today. It also walked straight back into the same critical argument that followed her first book: is this genuinely moving, accessible poetry, or "instapoetry" that trades literary craft for social-media shareability? This review is a review of The Sun and Her Flowers specifically -- not a rehash of the Milk and Honey conversation -- covering what this second collection actually adds (immigration, her mother's story, a more explicit political dimension), what critics and readers actually said about it, and where the instapoetry debate has real substance versus where it's just repeating itself.
What The Sun and Her Flowers Actually Is
The collection is organized into five sections -- wilting, falling, rooting, rising, and blooming -- tracing an arc from heartbreak and loss through to renewal, growth, and self-possession, paired throughout with Kaur's own simple line-drawing illustrations. It's longer and more thematically ambitious than Milk and Honey, adding a dedicated section on immigration and family history (rooting) that has no real equivalent in her first book, alongside continued material on romantic love, trauma, healing, and womanhood. The poems remain extremely short by traditional standards -- often just a handful of lines, frequently written entirely in lowercase with minimal punctuation -- a style choice that's as central to the ongoing critical debate around Kaur's work as anything she actually writes about.
The arc across the five sections is deliberately horticultural: wilting and falling deal with the end of a relationship and the isolation that follows, rooting shifts outward to family and heritage, and rising and blooming turn toward self-reliance and a hard-won sense of arrival. That structure gives the collection a clearer overall shape than a loose set of standalone poems would have, even though individual pieces are still meant to be read and understood on their own, out of sequence, the way most of Kaur's readers actually encounter her work online before ever picking up the physical book.
About Rupi Kaur and Why She Wrote This
Kaur was born in Punjab, India, and immigrated to Brampton, Ontario, with her family as a young child, an experience that surfaces directly in this collection in a way it largely didn't in Milk and Honey. By her own account, she originally conceived of The Sun and Her Flowers as a collection focused primarily on toxic love and the distorted worldview unhealthy relationships can produce. That focus shifted partway through writing, after a wave of real-world events around immigration and displacement in North America pushed her toward writing more directly about her family's story -- specifically her mother's experience leaving Punjab, and the quieter, more private forms that immigrant longing takes: searching for home "in foreign films and the international food aisles," as she puts it in the collection. Rather than folding individual immigrant experiences into one generalized narrative of trauma, Kaur has said she wanted to stay close to the specific, intimate details of her own mother's sacrifice and adjustment.
How It Compares to Milk and Honey
This is Kaur's second collection, and it's inevitably read against her first, which sold more than three million copies and made her one of the defining names of the instapoetry movement. The Sun and Her Flowers keeps the visual style, the illustrations, and the confessional, aphoristic voice that made Milk and Honey a phenomenon, but it's a more structurally ambitious book -- five sections instead of four, and a genuinely new thematic thread in the Rooting section that pushes beyond the largely relationship-and-healing focus of the first collection into immigration and political territory. Whether that expansion counts as growth or dilution is exactly where critics and readers split: some read it as Kaur maturing as a writer, others as a wider net cast over the same essential style without a corresponding deepening of craft. Either way, this collection stands on its own and doesn't require having read Milk and Honey first to make sense of it.
What Critics Actually Said
Rather than inventing a verdict, here's what was actually published about it:
“There are places where one wishes an editor had culled away the rambling and the repetition.”— Scroll.in
“Rupi Kaur's ‘the sun and her flowers’ is both canned and candid.”— The Diamondback
And the aggregate reader picture, for what it's worth:
Where Real Reviews Pushed Back
The instapoetry criticism that trailed Milk and Honey followed Kaur directly into this second collection: reviewers and readers have described the style as too simplistic to function as serious literary poetry, more suited to a scrolling social feed than a printed page, with some poems reading like they could have been written by anyone with a smartphone and a moment of feeling. That criticism isn't uniform -- Scroll.in's own review specifically called out places where tighter editing would have helped, suggesting the issue for some critics isn't the style itself but the amount of repetition allowed to remain across a longer collection than Milk and Honey. Kaur herself has responded to the broader instapoet criticism directly in interviews, including with CBS News, acknowledging the simplicity of her work is a deliberate choice rather than a limitation, aimed at accessibility over ornateness -- a defense that satisfies some critics and does nothing to move others.
On the Rooting Section: Immigration and Her Mother's Story
The Rooting section is the collection's clearest departure from Milk and Honey, and it's also where Kaur's writing is arguably at its most specific and least aphoristic. Rather than writing broadly about "the immigrant experience," she stays close to a handful of concrete, personal images: her mother's longing for Punjab surfacing in foreign films and the international food aisle of a Canadian grocery store, the particular texture of gratitude and guilt that comes with recognizing everything a parent gave up. It's also where the collection engages most directly with real political context -- the section was written and published during a period of intense public debate in North America around immigration and borders, and Kaur has been direct that current events shaped the section's final shape and placement in the book.
On the Illustrations and Kaur's Visual Minimalism
As in Milk and Honey, Kaur pairs many of the poems with her own simple black-and-white line drawings, a visual signature that's become as recognizable as the poems' lowercase, minimally punctuated style. The illustrations aren't decorative afterthoughts; they're built into the reading experience, often doing quiet narrative work a short poem alone couldn't carry -- a drawing of roots beneath a single line about family, for instance, extending the poem's meaning visually rather than through additional text. It's a consistent piece of Kaur's overall aesthetic project across both collections, and it's part of why her books read as a unified visual and textual experience rather than poems that happen to have some illustrations added.
That visual consistency is also part of what makes Kaur's work so easy to recognize and share on social platforms, which is both the source of her enormous reach and the root of the instapoetry criticism itself -- a poem-and-drawing pairing built for a phone screen is, by design, built differently than a poem meant to be read slowly on a printed page surrounded by white space. Whether that's a limitation or simply a different, valid mode of poetry for a different reading context is ultimately the real disagreement underneath most of the format criticism aimed at this collection.
Key Takeaways
- This is a standalone second collection, not a narrative sequel to Milk and Honey -- no shared characters, but overlapping and deepened themes
- The Rooting section, focused on immigration and her mother's story, is the book's clearest new thematic territory compared to her first collection
- The instapoetry criticism that followed Milk and Honey continues here, with at least one named review specifically calling for tighter editing
- Kaur's simple, lowercase style and accompanying line-drawing illustrations are a deliberate accessibility choice, by her own account, not an unintentional limitation
- Strong commercial reception -- top ten New York Times bestseller within two weeks of release -- runs alongside genuinely divided critical opinion, and both are real
Who This Book Is Actually For
Readers who connected with Milk and Honey's accessible, confessional style and want more of the same voice applied to new subject matter, particularly immigration and family history, will find real value here. It also suits readers newer to poetry generally who find traditional verse intimidating and want a low-barrier entry point into the genre.
Who Should Read Something Else Instead
If you're looking for poetry with more formal complexity -- meter, extended metaphor, denser literary technique -- the well-documented instapoetry criticism is a legitimate signal that this collection isn't built to satisfy that particular expectation. Readers who found Milk and Honey too repetitive or aphoristic for their taste are likely to have a similar reaction here, since the underlying style hasn't fundamentally changed.
Pros and Cons
Pros:
- The Rooting section adds genuinely new, specific, and personal thematic territory around immigration not present in Milk and Honey
- Accessible, confessional style that continues to resonate broadly -- reflected in a strong 4.08 out of 5 across nearly 389,000 Goodreads ratings
- Kaur's own illustrations remain an integrated, effective part of the reading experience rather than decoration
- Instant top-ten New York Times bestseller performance, backing up its commercial reach
- Works as a genuinely standalone collection -- no need to have read Milk and Honey first
Cons:
- The instapoetry criticism from Milk and Honey follows this collection directly and remains unresolved for skeptical readers
- At least one named review specifically flags rambling and repetition that tighter editing could have addressed
- The expanded five-section structure doesn't always deepen the collection's craft in proportion to its added length
Frequently Asked Questions
Is The Sun and Her Flowers a sequel to Milk and Honey?
Not a narrative sequel -- there are no shared characters or continuing story -- but it is Kaur's second full poetry collection, and it revisits and deepens several of Milk and Honey's core themes: heartbreak, healing, womanhood, and self-love, while adding new material on immigration and her family's history.
What's the real Goodreads rating?
4.08 out of 5 from roughly 388,800 ratings as of this writing, per Goodreads. Check the live number yourself, since it keeps moving.
What does the 'Rooting' section cover?
Immigration, borders, and the specific experience of Kaur's mother leaving Punjab for Canada -- rather than presenting a generalized refugee narrative, Kaur focuses on intimate, specific details of her mother's longing and sacrifice.
What's the most common criticism of this book?
That the poems are too simple or aphoristic to count as serious literary poetry -- the 'instapoetry' critique that follows Kaur across both her collections -- along with some reviewers noting the collection could have used tighter editing to cut repetition.
Sources & Further Reading
- Goodreads — The Sun and Her Flowers (aggregate rating, reader reviews)
- Scroll.in — “We couldn't wait for Rupi Kaur's second book of instapoems. Was it really worth the wait?”
- The Diamondback — review
- CBS News — Rupi Kaur on the simplicity of her poetry and the rise of Instapoets
- PositiveLifes.com — free inspirational and life-changing PDF books
Final Verdict
The Sun and Her Flowers does something Milk and Honey didn't attempt: it opens Kaur's accessible, confessional style up to explicitly political and historical territory through the Rooting section, and that expansion is where the book is strongest. The instapoetry debate that follows her work is real and unresolved, and Scroll.in's specific call for tighter editing is a fair, sourced criticism worth taking seriously. But the commercial and reader reception -- a top-ten bestseller debut and a strong aggregate Goodreads rating across nearly 389,000 ratings -- reflects a genuinely large audience for exactly what Kaur is doing here. If Milk and Honey worked for you, this is worth reading for the Rooting section alone.
Buy Day rating: 7.5/10