Rating: 
Summary: Superb Characters
Review: I'm not much of a writer, so just a brief note to say that the characters were truly brought to life in all the wonderful, annoying, spiteful, patient, and loving ways of people everywhere. I fell in love with this family, and felt the things they felt as I read the book. Bring on the sequel!
Rating:
Summary: Family story
Review: Meet Sripatha Rao, a fifty+ Indian man whose life is about to crash. His mediocre career has been a big disappointment to his mother, his marriage has long gone stale, his son is a political revolutionary, his sister is 40 something and still living with him, and he carries a great bitterness over the daughter he has not spoken to and banished from home years ago for marrying a white Canadian. Things come to a head when his daughter and her husband are killed in a car accident in Vancouver and the Canadian born granddaughter he's never met comes to India to live with them. A really intense reading experience about a family in crisis though the ending seemed a little rushed & not really credible.
Rating: 
Summary: Boring characters and plot
Review: Off all the many novels I have read about modern India this is the most disappointing. Paragraph after paragraph of numbing detail about daily routines, petty arguments and family disapproval wear away at the otherwise sensitive depictions of the familial roles and expectations that this family burdens under. The characters somehow never really emerge as real people, although the multi-generational theme is tied neatly together. This book was slightly reminiscent of the book Palace Walk set in old Cairo, but which was vastly superior in cultural depictions and well-drawn characters you could either care about or despise. The characters in this novel seemed two-dimensional and passive.
Rating: 
Summary: (3.5) A family: from boredom and despair to hope....
Review: Peopled with an insular Indian family, this deceptively simple novel allows the reader to peek behind the scenes of everyday familial interactions. This family has moved through the years almost by rote, honoring the old ways and accepting the mundane pattern of their lives. Meanwhile,across the ocean in America, tragedy strikes and an orphaned child appears on their doorstep. This helpless little granddaughter is the catalyst that finally propells the family into the future. In contrast, the great-grandmother tenaciously clings to the past, ever more self-absorbed as her worst traits define her final years. In order to survive, family members redefine their roles, charged with a renewed sense of interest. To nurture the child, they must open themselves to the future, and become more tolerant of eachother in the process. Ms. Badami writes with a straightforward charm, unpeeling the intricacies of her characters layer by layer.
Rating: 
Summary: Excessive Language, Very Good Story
Review: The characters are well done, the plot is engaging, the evocation of India excellent. BUT I can only give this book 4 stars because it badly needed an editor. As a reader who refuses to skip a word, in this book, I was sorely tempted. Almost every page could have benefited by being cut, a little and sometimes a lot. Nonetheless, we have real talent here and this is not a book to be missed... maybe skimmed in places. Look forward to her next one. Bound to be Great as this is almost so.
Rating:
Summary: You Can't Put It Down
Review: The Hero's Walk is one of those rare novels that just sweep you up until you relunctantly turn the last page. Badami writes as convincingly as a grandfather as she does as a 7 year old girl. At times this novel is hilarious and at times it will break you heart. Who could ask for more?
Rating:
Summary: Well-written domestic drama of small-town Indian life.
Review: The paralyzing heat at 5:00 a.m. on a July morning in Toturpuram, on the southeast coast of India, is depicted in intense, sensual imagery from the opening of the novel and becomes a metaphor for the lives of the Rao family. Three generations living together in a large and decaying house which they cannot afford to maintain, the Raos constantly carp at each other and seethe with long-standing resentments, the emotional temperature rising in concert with the heat, which "[hangs] over the town in long, wet sheets." Author Badami carefully selects her details to reveal both the realities of her characters' lives and the emotional climate they inhabit. The grande dame and grandmother of the family, Ammayya, is a slightly senile, mean-spirited, and caste-conscious woman, who controls her son Sripathi, her daughter Putti, and her long suffering daughter-in-law Nirmala. With unusual and homely similes and metaphors, Badami establishes the tone. Nirmala is "like a bar of Lifebuoy soap, functional but devoid of all imagination." Nirmala and Sripathi are "like a pair of bullock yoked together, endlessly turning the water wheel round and round, eyes bent to the earth." The cloudy sky is "curdled milk." Romance is the heart of the action. The problems in the marriage of Ammayya and her husband, and of Sripathi and Nirmala are described in detail. By contrast, Sripathi's daughter Maya has happily married an American and lives in the U.S, but she has been banished from Sripathi's life for defying his wishes. When Maya and her husband Alan are killed in an accident, leaving an 8-year-old daughter the Raos have never met, they bring this silent and traumatized orphan to India and into their uncertain lives. Predictably, the family learns from each other and begins to communicate, but the events which bring about these changes are either telegraphed early in the book (the fate of Putti, Sripathi's sister, for example) or result from external chance and not from their own actions. Additionally, the responses of the child to her strange, new environment do not ring true. Already traumatized and silent, this fragile child faces additional traumas after her arrival in Toturpuram, including some very dramatic ones at the end of the book, yet she seems to suffer no ill effects. Badami tells us the book is about "the chanciness of existence, the beauty and the hope and the loss that always accompanies life," themes she has abundantly illustrated, but the warm and fuzzy ending owes more to chance than what we or the characters would expect. Mary Whipple
Rating:
Summary: An entertaining read...
Review: This book is a great story for anyone who wants to curl up on a cold day. The characters are rich in description and you feel as though they could be any number of people you know. Even though I'm in Canada and they are in India, you feel no distance since the story is human in every aspect. The author weaves a wonderful and interesting tale.
Rating:
Summary: Wonderful
Review: This book is heart-breaking, gut-wrenching, a page-turner filled with pathos. I loved it madly.
Rating:
Summary: A well-done contrast between the Western and Indian cultures
Review: This book is touching, heart-breaking and most of all, realistic. I could not help but thinking how would I feel if, as a little girl, I would have been torn away from my culture and my recently-deceased parents' world to live with relatives in an unknown, mysterious place on the other side of the planet. That is how much impact the book has-- you feel the pain, love and feelings constrained by cultural norms that every character is burdened by. What is wrong and what is right takes many different meanings. The book makes you reconsider values that are culturally accepted but that go against the human spirit. How hearbreaking it must be for a parent to cut all ties with a beloved child because of a marriage against his/her wishes? As a reader, you can't stop thinking about that either.
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