Rating: 
Summary: the god of no things
Review: Where to start ... Arundhati Roy's writing style is highly derivative and heavily indebted to magical realism and Isabella Allende in particular. It lacks originality in style and content. It employs the over-used device of a character returning home and engaging in a series of flashbacks that eventually lead to the present ... and worst of all, buys into the falsehood of children being wise beyond their years (gag!). It's hard to feel any sympathy for a book populated with bourgeois characters that are each conveniently equipped with uncanny eccentricities. I fault the editor who seems to have locked her read pen in her desk when she should have been doing her job. This work should be edited down to a nice ten page short story.
Rating:
Summary: Ms Roy is consistently trite, banal, loud, and boring
Review: Fortunately, unlike her non-fictional rantings, fiction is one medium in which her ravings do not need to possess any internal coherence; after all, if I could convince readers merely through my power of prose, to read 350 pages about why I choose to wear red shoes to work everyday, I must have done a great job writing the damn thing. I presume this must be the case for this book having pleased so many readers into the enthusiastic recommendation as one finds here. In my case, however, the experience of reading this book was frightfully irritating. Compared to some current and earlier Indian writers (for e.g., Mistry or Narayan), Ms Roy has little - if any - story telling skills, she does a very shoddy job stylistically (in particular, I find little merit in trying to compare her effort to the work of Rushdie or - again - Narayan), and this is beside the fact that there is little of quality originality here (you will find her stylististic antecedants, not equals, in Joyce, Hemingway, and other major modern English writers). While most Indian writers in the English, seem to exhaust what they have to say (their life so far), in a single book which sometimes turns out to be fairly readable (for e.g., Chatterjee or Vakil), I am afraid Ms. Roy has not been able to go even that distance.
Rating: 
Summary: Wonderful, Beautiful, A Must Read !
Review: I've read it no less than 4 times! Maybe my favorite book of all time!
Rating:
Summary: Lyrical with hard truths
Review: Arundhati Roy's book "The God of Small Things" brings us a new view of a culture and people we know very little about. Her careful orchestration of words and plot will guide us through a very complex and misunderstood period (the socialist upheaval of the 60s in India), while confronting us with a hard and shocking clash between past and present. How can children understand what is ingrained in their parents and grandparents, without being taught how to see as they see? The children in her novel are brought to a place and time when the culture of this ancient nation is being tried and rejected by young people influenced by the urgency of the times, and the external bombardment of western values and culture. A must read for students of cultures and philosophy. A. Roy is an insightful and generous writer, who puts all our fears and doubts on the table, where you can see them and face them.
Rating:
Summary: A. Roy 'touched' everyone's hearts
Review: Things don't happen overnight. They accumulate over time building momentum until an invicible hand unleashes time's work & changes everyone's lives. Unfortunate lives which seemed to have already been written down in History, predetermined by fate & brought to a denouement by the actions of two people who dared cross the boundary set by society. The caste system like law dictates who should be loved, how & how much. I felt like being led by Roy in a time machine, visiting the Kochama's in different time frames, giving an insight on why they have become what they were. Baby with her unrequited Mulligan love life, Mamachi with her Papachi-caused moon craters in her head, Chacko losing a daughter holding a thimble for luck, Margaret living in a Joe-less & Sophie Mol-less universe, Ammu searching for tranquility beyond her Ayemenem river, & the fraternal twins constantly seeking acceptance, approval & love - Rahel in her Love-in-tokyo fountainhead & Esta in his beige pointed Elvis shoes. The Kochama's grieving, scheming with & against each other...all victims of their own fates. The manner the story has been told (present-past-present-past)combined with its unique choice of words (Ammu told Rahel to stop it & so she stoppited) enhanced the story's plot & overall character. I am certain Roy's poignant novel will touch everone's heart as it did mine.
Rating: 
Summary: Brilliant - but maybe too brilliant.
Review: Arundathi Roy took a long time over this book. What she has ended up with is a technically excellent novel, winner of the Booker prize, written in exquisite flowing prose which is coloured by Malayalam and the influences of children. It is a story of a love affair that could not be, a child who should not have died, a man who should not have been killed and twins who should not have been separated. This tale sits within the larger tapestry woven by a Syrian Christian family living in Kerala in India, tracing their lives from the backwards walking days of the British Raj to the present culture of daytime talkshows and world wrestling. The main story is told in tantalising glimpses and teasing passages, laid out like a detective novel, with clues all along the way. So when you get to the end, you know what happened, but still, you want the actors to play out their final scenes, just to be sure. But at the end of the book I felt, yes, good story, beautiful language, and yet.....it all feels so managed. As though Roy set out not to write a heartfelt story, but that from the beginning she intended it as a piece of crafted literature, something the critics would rave about. Like the Kathkali dancer in her tale, who compromises his art to entertain bored tourists, I feel always that this story was pruned for display and in the process lost much of its passion.
Rating:
Summary: Good story but for the words!
Review: I nearly gave up at the first couple of chapters .... I just could not get into this book, which I had the misfortune to take along on vacation. What I understood throughout the first half is that Sophie Mol dies. Then we look forward to the climax of her death but alas it is lost among childish phrases repeated meaningless sentences & you think to yourslef when you finish the book: Oh why did I even bother!
The writing is extremely pretencous with no taste at all, the reader is completely ignored through refernces to things utterly indian & are a mystery to most. The plot is lost in the book & it's not even a good one at that!
If you want to read about India, try Rohinton Mistry's A Fine Balance.
My advice to you about this stupid pretencous book is DON'T BOTHER!!
Rating:
Summary: Six stars!
Review: This book is heartbreakingly beautiful and remains my favorite read of the past 5 years. Arundati Roy is a magician. She created a luminous and fragile world which we view as if through a veil, the sometimes unreliable eyes of children. It is gorgeously written and she is incredibly talented.
Rating:
Summary: Has the world gone mad???
Review: When a book wins the booker prize and sells for 11.20 on amazon.com, something is wrong. I had to read this book for my english class over the summer. It is undoubtedly the worst book I have read in my entire life. First of all, the ending is in the beginning of the book, which spoils the book immediately. There is a simile in every paragraph and Roy absolutely must use personification with everything and anything possible. In addition there is an incredible amount of unecessary detail, with very little relevant plot. Numerous times, I have read pages of detail about something very forgettable and insignificant (I don't remember what) only to think, where is this going, but never finding the answer. If the book was a quarter of the length, it would have been much better. As if that's not bad enough, the characters are horribly portrayed, and barely at that. And why is it necessary to confuse the reader by continually jumping around? After about 75 pages of the book jumping from character to character, time to time and place to place, I gave up trying to enjoy it, or understand why Roy was writing what she was. I simply concentrated on getting through it, which was similar to chinese water torture. Unless you enjoy constantly trying to figure out what is going on and love endless, irrelevant detail, avoid this book at all costs.
P.S. Did all reviewers who gave this 4+ stars, including the critics get bribed to give this book a good review? That's the only reason I can think of them doing so...
P.P.S If an English teacher (mine) read this book in grad school, then how can highschool students be expected to read this book?
Rating:
Summary: Pretentious Drivel
Review: This book is terrible. I had to read it for an Indian literature class and it really made me want to vomit. If I had managed to vomit on a piece of paper it would have been more impressive than the writing in this novel. For starters this book is so derivative of Rushdie's work it is amazing. Read Midnights Children and then read this and you will see the similarities. Note: I am not saying that Rushdie's work is the same quality as Roy's, just that she stole alot from him. I've seen her claim to not be familiar with his work. Come on, you're Indian writing an Indian novel and you haven't heard of one of the best modern writers of your country? Then she throws in some unneeded sexual passages andputswordstogether because she is so artistic. She attacks the caste system, wow really original there. []If you read any of Ms. Roy's political commentary (read: rants) you will realize[]why the Booker prize people liked her so much. Or maybe they wanted to give the prize to an Indian author with a liberal bias, I don't know. All I know is that anyone who proclaims this book a great work of literature probably thinks Maya Angelou is a good poet too. Don't hold your breath waiting for another book to come out, she won a prize with this [] and she doesn't want to be found out for what she is.
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