A very different read, but in the end I enjoyed the story. There was a slight cultural barrier for me. The other girls in the book club could not finish the book or did not enjoy it.

In unusual writing style moving from the end of the story to the middle to the beginning to the end throughout the book, finally ending in the middle, Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things tells a story of a well-off Indian family, most of it from the perspective of one or the other of twin children, one a boy and the other a girl. It’s a dysfunctional family, of course, and just about everyone in it is more or less nuts.

Except I’m looking at it from the perspective of an American, not an Indian, so what may seem nuts to me may be a cultural difference. But Roy does seem to criticize Indian culture, herself, when she shows us how a culture with a history of touchables and untouchables affects lives and personalities.

The style as I speak of it sounds confusing and mixed up, but the book is not difficult to read at all. As a matter of fact, its back-and-forth movement leads to more suspense as Roy gives more and more hints about the middle and the end.

The God of Small Things received many great reviews in the last decade (or more). And it is a very good book. But I wouldn’t rate it a five out of five because I have a big problem with it.

From the very beginning, Roy points out a difficulty with one of the characters and comes back to it again and again. Yet she never answers the question she presents to the reader. Most readers will be surprised when they get to the end of the book and may think they have a defective copy that ended in the middle because the character’s life and readers’ questions are unresolved.

The book also annoyed me because Roy used so much pointless capitalization. At first I thought it did have a point: from a child’s perspective, some words are a lot bigger and more important; they’re proper nouns. But she did this so much, so often, even when we were seeing the story from an adult's perspective, that all those caps lost their intended meaning, whatever it was.

I know there are many readers who loved this book. I liked it.

Brilliant and unique writing by first time author. Darkly dramatic coming of age story about twins in Indian family. Glad that I read it with book group.

I kept trying to like this book ..and eventually succeeded once I better understood Arundhatis writing style and intent. What a gifted author!