God of Small Things

Rating:
Summary: A popular book, but not an intellectual one.
Review: Please, intelligent readers, do not naively accept the gushing recommendations to read this book. I found it to be an odd amalgam of literary techniques seemingly borrowed from other writers. For example, the shifting chronology and stream-of-conscious evoked William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, in that the reader learns the entire plot in the first chapter. However, unlike Faulkner, Roy leaves no mystery for the reader to solve; it is entirely predictable. Roy's hint of magical realism is interesting, but, as other reviewers have mentioned, seems to borrow from Gabriel Garcia Marquez. At first, the children's perspective of a terrible crime based on prejudice in a cruel, adult world seemed original... until I realized that Harper Lee used this same perspective in To Kill a Mockingbird. The only reason I would suggest reading TGOST is if you enjoy challenging other people's gushing affirmations of a book's popularity. Which-come to think of it-I do enjoy.