ruthiella 's review for:

Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh

4.0

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“From now on and forever afterwards, we will all be ship-siblings to each other. There’ll be no differences between us. The answer was so daring, so ingenious, as fairly to rob the women of their breath. Not in a lifetime of thinking, Deeti knew, would she have stumbled upon an answer so complete, so satisfactory and so thrilling in its possibilities.” In Sea of Poppies, kismet brings seemingly disparate group of characters in late 19th century India to the decks of the Ibis, once a slave ship, but now enlisted to transport indentured labor from Calcutta to Mauritius. The visible chains in the ship’s hold have been physically removed, but the figurative chains remain. The journey is both physical and mental, as our main characters transform themselves, casting off old identities and the confines of race, caste, religion and even gender and adopting new ones. It took me almost half the book to get into it. Each character speaks in their own English vernacular, which certainly adds both color and character, but is occasionally difficult to follow. I found it a relief when characters spoke in Bengali which is translated in to plain English. After the first 200 pages or so, reading became smooth sailing, but I wondered how Ghosh was going to wrap it all up in the following 250 pages. I didn’t realize the book was the first in a trilogy. I will read on. I want to see the complete metamorphosis