Rating: 
Summary: Love, life and loss of innocence
Review: Darkly disturbing and beautifully writing, Arundhati Roy has written an extraordinary first novel. Her voice is fresh and ripe with metaphor as the reader is surrounded by the world of southern India. Told through the eyes of Rahel, now grown, who revisits the childhood secret she shares with her twin brother, it speaks of love, life and a loss of innocence.They live in Kerula, a Christian matriarchal state, with their divorced mother, blind grandmother, bitter aunt and sad uncle. It is a world where impending communism is supposed to be weakening the caste system which has been rooted in the culture for thousands of years. It is a world of decay and disaster. There's a skyblue Plymouth, a graygreen river and a world of wonder for the two-egg twins whose vision is filtered through their clear-eyed innocence. The story is one of passion and forbidden love told with fresh eyes while "night's elbows rested on the water and watched.....". It grabs the reader with an emotional quality that goes far beyond the particular characters and even the particular setting. This is a book to be savored, thought about deeply, and, perhaps even read for a second time.
Rating: 
Summary: Brillaint
Review: The God of Small Things, Roy's first book is full of new ideas and a writing style I have never yet encountered. She draws you on in her amazingly descriptive writing style and interesting use of sentences. The story itself is filled with humour, compassion, bitter cruelty, and shock, and makes certain that it reaches into your soul and rips out your emotions. The facts are not clear initially, as Roy jumps throughout time, back and forth; yet near the closing chapters all the facts fall into place and we become aware of the writer's brilliant craftsmenship at connecting time periods and details. The well-rounded characters develop through the harrowing circumstances in which they are involved, and it is obvious that Roy understands and includes the true natures of people, both good AND evil and one often has to step back from the book and marvel at how she cuts through all the layers of pretence and reveals what many people really are. Issues include Communism, a detailed and genuine potryal of India and the Caste system-and how it affects the characters of the book. I recommend this book for anyone seeking to read a book of true genius and genuine understanding of what it is to live in a world of prejudice and assumption.
Rating:
Summary: The debut of an insightful mind
Review: I really love Arundhati Roy's writings. Her political commentaries are always insightful and offer a refreshing new perspective on things. Her debut novel, "The God of Small Things," was a smash hit and rightly so. It is a very well written and intriguing novel. That said a sense of depression pervades the novel, which whilst essential to the tone and plot, can be a bit overbearing for the reader. Its a tragic novel about survival, grief and abandonment. It must be said that there are almost no male characters with redeeming features in this novel. Theres a subtle Indian feminist message in this novel and its one that should be heard. Through Ammu , Roy is arguing that an adult woman without a husband is extremely vulnerable in Indian society. Ammu's suffering and the effect it has on her children is a plea for such injustice to be remedied. The God of Small Things is not a perfect novel, but if you want to be well read this book is a worthy addition to your collection.
Rating:
Summary: wonderful
Review: This is the story about a pair of unidentical twins, love, relationships, politics, religion and the Indian class society. The book is not chronological and you get fragments of the story in complete disorder. Then you realise that everything was in a special order, that it had to be in that particular order to make the book so good. The story is seen from different generations, but most of the time you see it through the twins' eyes. You meet the twins Rahel and Esthappen, their mother Ammu, Ammu's mother the half-blind Mammachi and her father Papachi. There is also the old aunt Baby Kochamma, Ammu's brother the old Marxist Chacko, his English daughter (the twins' cousin) Sophie Mol and the "untouchable", low-cast carpenter Velutha.
It all begins when Rahel is grown up and returns to Ayemenem (her childhood-home) in the south of India. At the beginning I didn't understand the plot and for a while I wondered what it really was about, if there was going to happen something to connect everything and everyone. At first I didn't get any answer. But the more I read, the more I wanted to read. And then the plot opens like a flower, at first there's nothing,
but after you've read a bit you see it a little clearer, and then even more clear and so on. It isn't until in the end, the last pages, you understand everything.
Roy uses the language in a beautiful way, with perfect words and descriptions of everything. You really get pictures of everything. She also plays on words, splits words and makes new ones of them and uses a lot of Indian words, which makes it very funny. It's also fun to read what the twins think and say to each other. How they feel like one person and understand each other without saying a word.
I really liked the book and hope many others will enjoy it.
Rating: 
Summary: First novel bumps and pitfalls.
Review: This book sets itself up to be something of an odd mystery: it lays out all of the "what" early on, leaving nearer to the end to reveal, sporatically, the details of "how." Its greatest asset, to me, was in how Ms. Roy used language and concept throughout to really get into how children see the world and their place in it. However, her language is also used in a way of repetition for effect, which I felt made the story drag more than it made it particularly poetic or compelling. Backstories were given to characters well after the point at which their stories would have furthered the book, making it seem to drag all the more. And finally, it seems to be written with an intent to create suspense toward the ending, but I felt that really would have only been effective had the ending not been so blatantly foreshadowed ... or rather, foretold. Overall I would say that it shows in the writing that this is a first novel, and the overall effect is perhaps of trying a little too hard. With less artistically self-conscious writing, I think Arundhati Roy could make a wonderful author of fiction, in addition to all else that she does. This book, however, is probably not a successful example of living up to that potential, and I would suggest checking it out from a library rather than buying it outright if you wish to judge for yourself.
Rating:
Summary: An amazingly wise and talented artist.
Review: This is a dazzlingly beautiful book, with terror and pain and love and charm, but with an incredible amount of humanity and vision. Roy is both a brilliant thinker and wonderful artist. Her craft is keen. The story so amazingly brings together the wonder of youth with the realities of race, class, and gender. The book is so much more than the sum of its part. Her charactes will live in me for a long time. She is a spectacular voice of our time. The reading this novel was a once in a life time experience I want to repeat!
Rating:
Summary: Amazing
Review: I read this book for the first time a year ago, and I have read it multiple times since. Ms Roy paints with words; her writing style is unique, probing, and it flows most gracefully. I love this book. I liked the story- There's almost a sense that what happened had to happen and could not be averted. And yes, you get the sense she speaks through Ammu. We need more Incredible Women Writers from non-western countries!
Check out "Purple Hibiscus" by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
Rating: 
Summary: Enjoyable, But Flawed
Review: The God of Small Things could have been a truly great novel, but, like an artist who can't leave a masterpiece alone, Arundhati Roy simply didn't know when to stop. The characters are vividly drawn, and the language is beautiful. Roy displays a penchant for descriptive language that is wonderfully arresting, but becomes repetitve and annoying. The reader gets the picture well before the novel ends, making the last several chapters anticlimactic. Still, I enjoyed the story of a truly dysfunctional family that suffered the after-effects of British Colonialism and an intractable caste system.
Rating:
Summary: The debut of an insightful mind
Review: I really love Arundhati Roy's writings. Her political commentaries are always insightful and offer a refreshing new perspective on things. Her debut novel, "The God of Small Things," was a smash hit and rightly so. It is a very well written and intriguing novel. That said a sense of depression pervades the novel, which whilst essential to the tone and plot, can be a bit overbearing for the reader. Its a tragic novel about survival, grief and abandonment. It must be said that there are almost no male characters with redeeming features in this novel. Theres a subtle Indian feminist message in this novel and its one that should be heard. Through Ammu , Roy is arguing that an adult woman without a husband is extremely vulnerable in Indian society. Ammu's suffering and the effect it has on her children is a plea for such injustice to be remedied. The God of Small Things is not a perfect novel, but if you want to be well read this book is a worthy addition to your collection.
Rating:
Summary: lost optimism
Review: The novel is about a pair of fraternal twins who have been separated for 23 years and have to take down all their barriers to restore their bond emotionally. The reading level is high and uses difficult and flowery words. Also the story is difficult to follow because of the way the author goes back and forth in time so freely not giving much background to the story until the very end. The book is also for more mature readers because of the vivid account of a boy being sexually assaulted, the abuse of many wives, and the incest that goes on in the story. The plot is overall uneventful because of the way the book manoeuvres from memories to present, once you figure out that the story takes place in one day you find the story not fulfilling and has no point. The ending also (because the fate of the characters is also given to us) should have been more optimistic, giving light for a better future, instead the readers already know what happens to the characters so the optimism is lost.
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