A review by fictionwriter
The Glass Palace by Amitav Ghosh

2.0

I'm about to give up on this novel halfway through, an act of abandonment that as a fellow writer, I don't do lightly. In the beginning, I was drawn in and involved in the lives of his characters, the Indian boy living in Burma, his mentor, the Burmese King and Queen sent into exile by the British, the servants in their house. But as these characters became woven into each others' lives, I felt more and more the hand of the author manipulating them like chess pieces in order to serve his dramatic needs, his desire to lay out the history of India and Burma in the 20th Century. Because of this, I lost interest in the characters. The best works of historical fiction put the characters first, rather than molding their lives to fit what the author wants to tell us about history.