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A review by dreamofbookspines
Bombay Blues by Tanuja Desai Hidier
2.0
This quote sums up the entirety of the book. If you read nothing else in this review, read this quote to decide if you'll like the book:
*internal screaming*
The thing is, if I had been 19 when I read this, I probably would have loved it. Now, this is nearly 600 pages. I got stuff to do. Ain't nobody got time for that many pages, half of which read like the above. The story itself was interested, but got buried in the trash avalanche of words. There were some gems to be found, beautiful phrases and so on, but you really had to be prepared to wade through the garbage of the rest. I recommend thigh-high waders because that manure was bottomless.
What saves this book from being 1 (or 0) stars is the plot. But the plot can't redeem it. Plus, Karsh is annoying. That withholding dance that some people find so sexy just seems like a waste of time to me. There was a notably really excellent sex scene somewhere in the middle of the book, but again, it couldn't save the rest of it.
The last two chapters are even worse than the quote above. I wrote them off as complete nonsense, just spews of words strung together in what Hidier apparently thought was a pleasing fashion. And I'm sure it was, but after 500+ pages, I was fed up with her nonsense.
Cowboy mirror-shoring where I'd just been, me barebacking that hyphen, no lady-in-waiting but a cowgirl fate-gaiting, skippering, too, car lights sliding the many-cabled sails of this splurge of a surge of a bridge, as if it were sensuously blinking up and down, knowing if I were to bait it with my photographic tackle, snap it from this fast-speed pane, all I'd get'd be black backdrop skirred with neon squidges, skywriting hieroglyphically hippocamping, a neo-mythic X-ray lightning bugged with birds drugged, flying fish glug, zeppelins unplugged...now gazing into another set of rearview driver eyes (mappleblack, piquant), my re-return message to him, that bay-roving buckaroo, (sub)urban picaroon, just capriolistically hop-skipping-sent as that steeded sea-riding gangplanking swanimal of a finished yet incomplete - or was it unfinished yet complete?
*internal screaming*
The thing is, if I had been 19 when I read this, I probably would have loved it. Now, this is nearly 600 pages. I got stuff to do. Ain't nobody got time for that many pages, half of which read like the above. The story itself was interested, but got buried in the trash avalanche of words. There were some gems to be found, beautiful phrases and so on, but you really had to be prepared to wade through the garbage of the rest. I recommend thigh-high waders because that manure was bottomless.
What saves this book from being 1 (or 0) stars is the plot. But the plot can't redeem it. Plus, Karsh is annoying. That withholding dance that some people find so sexy just seems like a waste of time to me. There was a notably really excellent sex scene somewhere in the middle of the book, but again, it couldn't save the rest of it.
The last two chapters are even worse than the quote above. I wrote them off as complete nonsense, just spews of words strung together in what Hidier apparently thought was a pleasing fashion. And I'm sure it was, but after 500+ pages, I was fed up with her nonsense.