Rating: 
Summary: A touching book
Review: I was sitting in my foreign policy of India class and my teacher started discussing about the lives of people in the untouchable castes; he stated that most of them end up going into the leather and tanning business...and I thought "yeah thats Omprakash and Ishvar said"...This is what "A Fine Balance" will do to you, the characters will become real to you. Each main character and their complicated relations with one another is well developed in this approxiamately six hundred page book. Even the peripherial characters become accessible in this book. They become your friends and you end up wanting the best for all of them, but Mistry is too much of a realist to settle for happily ever endings. Mistry gives a very frank account of life during the emergency in India and all the misfortunes that happened during that time. Instead of sparing readers of reality, he illustrates what happened to many people in India during that time. Castration, deaths and political corruption were typical of India during the emergency. Mistry attempts to make this historical account more alive and touching by using characters in his story to demonstrate how horrific life was during this time...and he succeeds.
Rating:
Summary: Great Historical Fiction
Review: If you enjoy historical fiction, this book is for you. Mistry does a fantastic job of depicting the class strugles that have existed within India during the past 75 years. A great book.
Rating: 
Summary: Compelling as a roadside pileup
Review: This was one of those rare novels that I just couldn't put down until I finished it. I'm a voracious reader, and it takes an exceptional book to cross my threshold of "put it aside and start something else". Mistry presents a deep analysis of India that is the more horrible for being so real. A tragic story, with things ending badly for each character, his writing totally made me care deeply about the fate of each one. BE WARNED, it's not a story for weak stomachs, lots of parts are grisly and all of it is heartbreaking: political corruption, caste violence, gender bias, and economic oppression, far beyond anything I have ever heard of in the US. Mistry is as powerful a writer as Stowe or Dickens or Riis.
Rating:
Summary: Amazing Tale I devoured
Review: I flew through this book and like other great novels was sad when it ended. We read this for book club. As I read it late at night under my comforter I thoguht I trully do not deserve to be as fortunate as I am. I did not like the ending however.
Rating:
Summary: Absolutely enthralling
Review: Do not miss reading this book. I was completely immersed in the plot and characters of this book from the beginning. I rarely think that a book merits a five-star rating, but this is a real treasure. I learned a lot about India and its politics as an adjunct to the lives of the characters - there was no sermonizing, moralizing or self-pity. The characters dealt with things as they were to the best of their abilities. Our limited understanding of the conditions under which they lived made their actions and reactions very real. I found the writing to be tight and just right for the tone of the book - no spare sentiments that weren't necessary to achieve the insights required. The ending is superlative - it is the way the book had to end in order to complete our knowledge of the lives lived. The utter despair is beyond comprehension for those of us who live with a sense of security that we seemingly take for granted. It will be difficult to find a worthy successor to read now that I have finished this book.
Rating:
Summary: I hate you Mistry
Review: I walked by the homeless in the streets while growing up in a city by the sea not unlike the one in this book. I was repulsed by their grimy faces, their missing limbs, their tattered and dirty clothes. Fearful I might catch their poor people diseases if I ventured too close, I would cross the street to avoid them. Sometimes throwing coins into their tin cups from a sterile distance-sometimes missing, and walking away praising my own charity. Thank you Mr. Mistry for showing me the other side of the story. Thank you for putting into plain and powerful words exactly how unfair life in India is to the poor and lower castes. You have taught me more than any text book could about the injustices that daily occur in India. I hate you for your brutal honesty and for making me feel this way. Or perhaps, like you prophesized in the begining of this book, I am only blaming you for my own insensitivity. For those of you considering reading this book, here is my warning. Mistry will seduce you with his flowing words and his gripping story. He will make you feel for his characters. He will show you a side of life that millions of people bravely struggle through. And soon you will begin to fear turning the page for fear of what might happend to the characters. And rest assured, when you turn the last page, and look for some solace, you will find none. For all is true. I have seen the Shankars and Ishvars and Oms. Go to any Indian city street corner, and you will too.
Rating:
Summary: Unique Story
Review: Well, I was very impressed with this book. Much more than I thought I would be. I thought it might be hard to understand or relate to or boring. It was neither, it was very easy to understand and most parts were very interesting to read. The author did a good job to get you "hooked" on the characters. You wanted to know where they came from, and he explained that, and where they were going, he did that. It's a very sad story. It was cool to read about a place that is so different from "home". And to learn about what their country, relgion and history is like. It's long, but well worth the time
Rating: 
Summary: Tragic
Review: This book was great! Don't hold your breath for the happily ever after. The author follows life not what will sell best.
Rating: 
Summary: Emotionally Flat and Uninspired
Review: I found this book to be completely and utterly disapointing. Though at first, I enjoyed this book, once I got about 100 pages into it, I was constantly rolling my eyes and throwing it across the room. Don't get me wrong, the story is quite good. The writing, however, is completely simplistic and bare. The sentences are choppy, uncreative and uninspired. Mistry makes broad, sweeping assumptions about his characters without giving us any background information. Instead of developing his characters gradually, Mistry will write one sentence marking a huge transition in their lives and then move on.
The premise of this novel centers around two tailors living in India in 1975 during a State of Emergency. Though Mistry tries hard to represent the misfortunes and hardhsips of the tailors as they struggle to survive, the emotional conflict and struggle is flattened out by the simplistic and unsophisticated writing style. Though the plot is believable, the characters are not. They are, for the most part, boring and shallow characters with no depth. Mistry tries hard to paint the tailor's tragic past as somehow determining their personalities in the present. However, after having revealed the incident of their past, he merely moves on, without making any sort of connections as to how it has affected the tailors in the present. It seems to me that Mistry completely flattens out the conflicts at the center of the novel. He tries hard to make the tailor's working and living situations seem tense. However, they simply seem ridiculously flat and boring. There is no tension in this novel. I never became attached to the characters. Overall, this novel is not worth reading unless you want to get angry at Mistry's sweeping generalizations and ridiculously simplistic writing style.
Rating:
Summary: A wonderful saga
Review: I love good thick books that create a world a reader can enter and live for a while; "thick" not being the exclusive qualifier. Surely, beginning the journey of a long book can often not be worth the trip. However, this book greatly satisfied all of my requirements. It held my interest, I came to truly care for the chacters, they often reached up out of the pages and surprised me, I was even reminded of a bit of history, and I was sad when the book was finished and I had to return to the real world. What more is there?
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