Absolutely amazing, must-read! Roy tells the story in backwards order and it's just fascinating.

This is one of the most brilliant novels I've ever read -- although not an easy read. Arundhati Roy is a master of language --- and of slowly enchanting the reader in a nonlinear plot that is both mystifying and compelling. Readers might want to be aware that there is a free online guide to the book at gradesaver.com - a great help in reading and understanding it!
Tracy M.

Beautiful language and a haunting tale of love and loss. Read it for a book group and all of us had praise for the book. Roy's first novel and a Mann Booker prize winner.

A marvelous story told in an intriguing manner! She captures the thought processes of the children beautifully! I had never heard of this author, but I will look for other books by her.

This is an incredible book, and just like the river that is so central to the haunting yet beautiful lives of the main characters. The prose will catch you up and carry you along in its flow, while the story meanders and ebbs and flows -- sometimes tranquil, and sometimes fast and furious. Wow.

Roy's "God of Small Things" is almost pure purple prose. Although the writing is pretty and entertaining in itself, it's too frilly, too clogged up with flowery arrangments that it draws attention to itself rather than the story. I found myself admiring all the adjectives and adverbs instead of following the plot.

This distraction along with the nonlinear plot, which is laden with too many themes, makes it an annoying book that I was glad to put down and unwilling to pick up again. Compare it to receiving a fruit cake wrapped up in fancy packaging. Just too much going on so it winds up sitting in the cupboard, or in this case the bookshelf.


An example from the first page:


"May in Ayemenem is a hot, brooding month. The days are long and humid. The river shrinks and black crows gorge on bright mangoes in still, dustgreen trees. Red bananas ripen. Jackfruits burst. Dissolute bluebottles hum vacuously in the fruity air. Then they stun themselves against clear windowpanes and die, flatly baffled in the sun."


Pretty? Sure. But there are reams of pages with this descriptive prose which Roy piles on until it becomes too heavy and collapses on the reader's patience.

Congratulations to anyone who finished this book. You are a better person than me! I thought it was horrible, the writing was hard to follow, the characters were uninteresting and the dialogue could not be slower. I understand that it got great reviews and won awards for its literary genius, but it was lost on me. I think the more awards the further I should stay away from it, the flowery description and wordy intros to the norm are not necessary and to me are a waste of the readers time. If you want a story that is intersting and gets to the point so you can care about what happens next, leave this one go, if you are into the fowery text and the long flowing sentences about one small item not essential to the book, then grab ahold and become bored. I made it 59 pages and it felt like 590! I can't waste my time on books that don't interest me and carry on forever about what I consider nothing. As you can tell I was highly disappointed by the professional and literary reviews on a book that I felt didn't come close to the mark.

A little slow, cumbersome at first, but beauty unfolds as does creative strength.

This book was absolutely breath-taking. I can't praise this author enough--her artistry is spectacular. If you enjoy novels by Indian novelists, you can't afford to miss this one.

I had a hard time with this book. I liked the unusual, non-linear style in theory, but had a hard time staying with it. It's an unique way to go about a common seeming plot, but I felt that the style and language actually detracted from my experience.

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Fantastic book. Set in the background of kerala. The story theme moves back and forth between past and present in different times and then finally it merges.

I wasn't sure what to think about this book when I finished. While it was beautifully written, the plot was sometimes hard to understand. Yet, weeks later as I think about it, I appreciate more the intricate story of the twins Rahel and Estha, and what happened when their cousin Sophie Mol visited one summer.

Please see my full review here

Rich detail in this story of an Indian family and its complications as well as its adjustmetns to a modernizing country.

In her first novel, award-winning Indian screenwriter Arundhati Roy conjures a whoosh of wordplay that rises from the pages like a brilliant jazz improvisation. The God of Small Things is nominally the story of young twins Rahel and Estha and the rest of their family, but the book feels like a million stories spinning out indefinitely; it is the product of a genius child-mind that takes everything in and transforms it in an alchemy of poetry. The God of Small Things is at once exotic and familiar to the Western reader, written in an English that's completely new and invigorated by the Asian Indian influences of culture and language.

The language of this book is beautiful. The God of Small Things is, in a word, captivating.

A beautiful novel set in India. Amongst the beauty and poverty there is a tragic and sensual tone to the book that keeps one spellbound. The author won The Booker Prize, England's most prestigious literary award for this in 1997. Worth reading!

Amazing but tragic story. Every time I read it I find some new little detail to love in the plot, the writing, the structure. A must-read.

New York Times Book Review

"The quality of Ms. Roy's narration is so extraordinary at once so morally strenuous and so imaginatively supple that the reader remains enthralled all the way through."

John Updike, The New Yorker

"A novel of real ambition must invent its own language, and this one does.... A Tiger Woodsian debut."

Washington Post Book World

"A splendid and stunning debut."

Newsweek

"Outstanding. A glowing first novel."

USA Today
"Offers such magic, mystery and sadness that, literally, this reader turned the last page and decided to reread it. Immediately. It's that hauntingly wonderful."

I had heard great things about this book, but I thought it was a little strange and disturbing in places. Overall, a poignant portrayal of boundaries.

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