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clarice629's review against another edition
challenging
dark
emotional
reflective
sad
slow-paced
3.0
this is a hard book to read both literally and emotionally.
life is hard. life is harder when you are poor. no. when you are dead poor. like poverty poor. and you have to make decisions. many times the decisions are not good or bad. rather they are based on which one is more damaging, which ones affect me now. I need to sort out Life now so I cant think too much about the future. Life is so hard that the will to survive must be uber strong or you will end up committing suicide. Life is like the environment in Annawadi- you cant see anything clean you cant see anything good. you find value in rubbish.
the book is hard to read literally because while I like Boo's style (I thought she writes like a journalist only later to realise she really is a journalist), the book has a lot of "describing" and very little "happening". she gave each character a chapter of 25 pages and that took up approximately 50% of the book. I cant see a core plot here, just long documentaries of various characters and their misery porn. this shouldn't be a novel. this book feels like a 200+ page newspaper.
life is hard. life is harder when you are poor. no. when you are dead poor. like poverty poor. and you have to make decisions. many times the decisions are not good or bad. rather they are based on which one is more damaging, which ones affect me now. I need to sort out Life now so I cant think too much about the future. Life is so hard that the will to survive must be uber strong or you will end up committing suicide. Life is like the environment in Annawadi- you cant see anything clean you cant see anything good. you find value in rubbish.
the book is hard to read literally because while I like Boo's style (I thought she writes like a journalist only later to realise she really is a journalist), the book has a lot of "describing" and very little "happening". she gave each character a chapter of 25 pages and that took up approximately 50% of the book. I cant see a core plot here, just long documentaries of various characters and their misery porn. this shouldn't be a novel. this book feels like a 200+ page newspaper.
alexashabit's review against another edition
emotional
informative
sad
medium-paced
4.25
Content Warnings
Moderate: Fire/Fire injury and Suicide
cleothegreat's review against another edition
4.0
4.5 stars with half a star removed due to a slight lack of connection between myself and the people interviewed but I suspect this is more to due to the authors writing style than anything else. this was a fascinating account of lives entrenched within deep poverty as well as a look at those that exacerbate and profit off of it
jenmangler's review against another edition
4.0
Every time I picked up this book I had a very difficult time putting it down. I had to know what happened to Abdul and Kalu and Fatima and Asha. I also had to keep reminding myself that it was a work of nonfiction, that these people weren't characters in a book. They are real people. It was sometimes so heartbreakingly frustrating to see them struggle and start to get ahead - just a little bit - only to have circumstances overwhelm them. It was difficult to see them struggle to hold out hope in seemingly hopeless situations.
Towards the end of the book the author wrote something that so perfectly stated what was going on in Annawadi: "...powerless individuals blamed other powerless individuals for what they lacked. Sometimes they tried to destroy one another. Sometimes, like Fatima, they destroyed themselves in the process. When they were fortunate, like Asha, they improved their lots by beggaring the life chances of other poor people."
Towards the end of the book the author wrote something that so perfectly stated what was going on in Annawadi: "...powerless individuals blamed other powerless individuals for what they lacked. Sometimes they tried to destroy one another. Sometimes, like Fatima, they destroyed themselves in the process. When they were fortunate, like Asha, they improved their lots by beggaring the life chances of other poor people."
monicakuryla's review against another edition
1.0
The premise of this book seemed so promising, but the delivery was disaapointing. Prose and chronology was very confusing and too many characters of the book made it worse.
oxnard_montalvo's review against another edition
4.0
Non-fiction fiction. Investigative fiction. Retrospective and condensed reality. However you want to categorise it, it's good.