Author: Arundhati Roy
Pages: 321
Genre: Fiction
Personal Rating: 2.5
Awards: Booker Prize
From the back cover:
There were many characters. I didn't really care about any of them. I don't feel Roy developed any of them enough to allow that. Or she jumped around so much you couldn't develop a bond with them. Plus there names were very confusing. Now this may partially be my fault. I started this book over a week ago out of town at a funeral. I got a chapter or two in and put it down in disgust. I re-injured my foot yesterday so I picked it back up for a marathon finish. I was determined to finish it so i could move onto a book I would enjoy more.
It's a little funny, I just went and read a few 5 star reviews and a lot of them even admit they initially had trouble staying interested or found it slow going.
Must read? I don't think so. With so many other books about India out there I would grab something else. Oh yeah, the story line overall is just plain depressing.
Pages: 321
Genre: Fiction
Personal Rating: 2.5
Awards: Booker Prize
From the back cover:
The story of the tragic decline of an Indian family whose members suffer the terrible consequences of forbidden love, The God of Small Things is set in the state of Kerala, on the southernmost tip of India. Armed only with theWell, unfortunately I've read another prize winner that has left me shaking my head. While I do admit Roy writes beautifully, I also found her writing tedious and confusing. She often jumped back and forth in time, making it difficult to tell what was going in. In one paragraph Ammu is alive and a few paragraphs later she has been dead for a long time. I found this novel difficult to read. After several chapters I found her writing style to be annoying. "She told me to 'stop it' so i 'stoppited it'". To me she came across as trying to hard to write uniquely.
invincible innocence of children, the twins Rahel and Esthappen fashion a childhood for themselves in the shade of the wreck that is their family — their lonely, lovely mother, Ammu (who loves by night the man her children love by day), their blind grandmother, Mammachi (who plays Handel on her violin), their beloved uncle Chacko (Rhodes scholar, pickle baron, radical Marxist, bottom-pincher), their enemy, Baby Kochamma (ex-nun and incumbent grandaunt), and the ghost of an imperial entomologist's moth (with unusually dense dorsal tufts).
When their English cousin and her mother arrive on a Christmas visit, the twins learn that Things Can Change in a Day. That lives can twist into new, ugly shapes, even cease forever. The brilliantly plotted story uncoils with an agonizing sense of foreboding and inevitability. Yet nothing prepares you for what lies at the heart of it.
There were many characters. I didn't really care about any of them. I don't feel Roy developed any of them enough to allow that. Or she jumped around so much you couldn't develop a bond with them. Plus there names were very confusing. Now this may partially be my fault. I started this book over a week ago out of town at a funeral. I got a chapter or two in and put it down in disgust. I re-injured my foot yesterday so I picked it back up for a marathon finish. I was determined to finish it so i could move onto a book I would enjoy more.
It's a little funny, I just went and read a few 5 star reviews and a lot of them even admit they initially had trouble staying interested or found it slow going.
Must read? I don't think so. With so many other books about India out there I would grab something else. Oh yeah, the story line overall is just plain depressing.
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