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3.94 AVERAGE
3.94 AVERAGE
dark
emotional
informative
reflective
sad
tense
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
challenging
emotional
sad
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
This is one of the most quietly devastating books I've ever read. It tells the story of a family in Kerala, India, unraveling under the weight of generational trauma, political tensions, and unspoken rules about who is allowed to want what. Each character carries their own silent heartbreak, and Roy slowly, masterfully reveals their pain not through explosive moments, but through careful detail, memory, and implication. There’s so much that's left unsaid in this novel, and that silence is where the real damage lives.
What left the biggest impression on me was the perspective of the children, Rahel and Estha. Roy doesn't just describe their thoughts, she inhabits their worldview. Seeing the story unfold through their eyes, even when we as readers know more than they do, made the narrative all the more painful. And as the perspective shifts between timelines and voices, the sorrow only deepens.
At its heart, the novel is a meditation on forbidden love - on the arbitrary, often brutal "love laws" that decide who can be with whom, and how much love is acceptable before it becomes dangerous. I learned so much about the caste system in India through this story, not through explanation, but through feeling, through watching its consequences ripple through every interaction. The way Roy connects personal grief to structural injustice is subtle but powerful.
The writing is lush, vivid, and rhythmic, always walking the line between beauty and brutality. Every sentence feels carefully placed, like a mosaic of memory and loss. I found myself rereading entire pages just to sit with the language a little longer.
This book broke my heart quietly and thoroughly. It's not a fast read, nor is it always an easy one, but it's the kind of novel that asks you to slow down and pay attention - to the small things, to what's unsaid, to what society teaches us to overlook.
What left the biggest impression on me was the perspective of the children, Rahel and Estha. Roy doesn't just describe their thoughts, she inhabits their worldview. Seeing the story unfold through their eyes, even when we as readers know more than they do, made the narrative all the more painful. And as the perspective shifts between timelines and voices, the sorrow only deepens.
At its heart, the novel is a meditation on forbidden love - on the arbitrary, often brutal "love laws" that decide who can be with whom, and how much love is acceptable before it becomes dangerous. I learned so much about the caste system in India through this story, not through explanation, but through feeling, through watching its consequences ripple through every interaction. The way Roy connects personal grief to structural injustice is subtle but powerful.
The writing is lush, vivid, and rhythmic, always walking the line between beauty and brutality. Every sentence feels carefully placed, like a mosaic of memory and loss. I found myself rereading entire pages just to sit with the language a little longer.
This book broke my heart quietly and thoroughly. It's not a fast read, nor is it always an easy one, but it's the kind of novel that asks you to slow down and pay attention - to the small things, to what's unsaid, to what society teaches us to overlook.
reflective
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
challenging
dark
emotional
reflective
sad
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
challenging
dark
emotional
funny
informative
reflective
sad
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
I am speechless and searching for words to bring this book to life in the eyes of someone ignorant to its beauty, and, unsurprisingly, not finding any that do it justice more than the text itself.
Arundhati Roy crafts a language, an entire emotional system, even, to convey this story. The language is the narrator, adapting itself to the character it witnesses- it sees inside their hearts and minds and brings out their deepest emotional meanderings to the forefront, through metaphor and straight phrase and whatnot.
By the end of the the book, most metaphors have taken the place of their usual literary counterparts, so much so that someone reading only the final chapters would not understand the events, or even understand the singular meaning of sentences that conveyed these events.
And its also funny? The humour shows up like an uninvited guest- charming, subtle, and gone just as quickly as it comes. Jokes come that require many paragraphs of setup, paragraphs that one thinks may lead to something else entirely, only to discover the innocent wit lying at the end of the trail.
Small things (haha) mentioned in early chapters make guest appearances later on only to fully assimilate into the main cast, already full with metaphors and other notable figures. Entire earlier narratives are mentioned, just to evoke that special feeling you felt then.
Along with this, the imagery is vivid, vibrant and high contrast, like an overly edited photograph. Seemingly useless things are described to describe another seemingly useless thing, which in turn tells you about what may be the actually relevant thing.
Arundhati Roy creates compound words with an almost egoistical disregard for the english language, she takes it and what it offers and makes it her own; she reigns it in and holds firm, guiding it along her desired path.
There is, unfortunately, very little 'health' to be found in the book, and the book itself addresses it in a self aware, yet subtle fashion. The ending remains melancholic and bittersweet- 80% cocoa dark chocolate.
Arundhati Roy crafts a language, an entire emotional system, even, to convey this story. The language is the narrator, adapting itself to the character it witnesses- it sees inside their hearts and minds and brings out their deepest emotional meanderings to the forefront, through metaphor and straight phrase and whatnot.
By the end of the the book, most metaphors have taken the place of their usual literary counterparts, so much so that someone reading only the final chapters would not understand the events, or even understand the singular meaning of sentences that conveyed these events.
And its also funny? The humour shows up like an uninvited guest- charming, subtle, and gone just as quickly as it comes. Jokes come that require many paragraphs of setup, paragraphs that one thinks may lead to something else entirely, only to discover the innocent wit lying at the end of the trail.
Small things (haha) mentioned in early chapters make guest appearances later on only to fully assimilate into the main cast, already full with metaphors and other notable figures. Entire earlier narratives are mentioned, just to evoke that special feeling you felt then.
Along with this, the imagery is vivid, vibrant and high contrast, like an overly edited photograph. Seemingly useless things are described to describe another seemingly useless thing, which in turn tells you about what may be the actually relevant thing.
Arundhati Roy creates compound words with an almost egoistical disregard for the english language, she takes it and what it offers and makes it her own; she reigns it in and holds firm, guiding it along her desired path.
There is, unfortunately, very little 'health' to be found in the book, and the book itself addresses it in a self aware, yet subtle fashion. The ending remains melancholic and bittersweet- 80% cocoa dark chocolate.
dark
emotional
mysterious
sad
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
dark
emotional
funny
mysterious
reflective
sad
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
This is the book of small and big things - heart wrenching, empathy igniting, tear breaking, anger fuelling, laughter causing and then eternally saddening and shocking! Dum dum
Ohh the whimsical language and children's narrations give the harrowing crimes of the society a much needed mirror.
The play with the timeline confused me a bit in the beginning but it was equally rewarding by the time I finished the book. I would say Roy has written this so amazingly that I crave for more of it. It was a bitter sweet feeling finishing it - finishing the book meant the pain and agony of twins, Ammu and Velutha have ended but I wanted to see more of their lives, more of all the small things and less of big things!
May all the Gods of small things dreaming small and big, dreaming outside of their decided fate by society outlive Chappu Thamburan and see their dreams dreaming more dreams!!
Ohh the whimsical language and children's narrations give the harrowing crimes of the society a much needed mirror.
The play with the timeline confused me a bit in the beginning but it was equally rewarding by the time I finished the book. I would say Roy has written this so amazingly that I crave for more of it. It was a bitter sweet feeling finishing it - finishing the book meant the pain and agony of twins, Ammu and Velutha have ended but I wanted to see more of their lives, more of all the small things and less of big things!
May all the Gods of small things dreaming small and big, dreaming outside of their decided fate by society outlive Chappu Thamburan and see their dreams dreaming more dreams!!
dark
emotional
mysterious
reflective
sad
tense
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
dark
emotional
mysterious
reflective
sad
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Unforgettable, monumental to me, a classic, because of so many things... the prose is so lyrical and inventive and poetic and creates a self-referential world within itself fitting the emotional significance of what she is trying to build. Eye-opening themes of power, vulnerability, caste, wealth, family trauma, violence, colonialism, sexuality, politics, and most of all, the rules of who is loved and unloved. I could go on and on I and I WILL be reading this again.