This was the start of a marvelous adventure story. Wonderfully diverse characters and settings, with the 1830s opium trade at the center of the story, make Sea of Poppies a fascinating read. As a stand-alone novel, I could only rate this work as "above average". The reader is left unsatisfied and hanging at the end of book one of Ghosh's planned trilogy. While I do want to finish the series, I feel that in a really well-written series, the reader wants more at the end of each book, but can also enjoy each in and of itself. Ghosh is a talented linguist and liberally uses the varied dialects appropriate to his setting. While this lends an authenticity and flavor to the tale, the reader has to work hard to become comfortable with the nautical terms and lascars' lingo. Sometimes the linguistic richness was overdone: I came upon paragraphs reminiscent of Jabberwocky, and this detracted a bit from the flow of the story (I had to stop and laugh!). Overall, this was an engrossing novel, and I look forward to reading the next two.