Tag Book Review
In light of the long-anticipated release of Arundhati Roy’s second novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, what better time to look back on her stunning debut, The God of Small Things? Winner of the 1997 Booker Prize,
Winner of the 1997 Booker Prize, The God of Small Things was an instant, immense, and international success. After its publication, Roy deliberately distanced herself from fiction writing, turning her attention instead to political activism, in reaction to rising social conflict in India.
Finally, after twenty long years and a book over ten years in the making, she has once again decided to grace the fiction world with her genius. To better understand her writing and her evolution as an artist, let’s rediscover the gem that is The God of Small Things.
“If you want to make it, all you have to do is try.”
These words apply not only to physical inventions but to life in general. The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind is an exalting tale of a William Kamkwamba who fought to overcome the many obstacles that faced him in his rural African community in the heart of Malawi. He and Bryan Mealer tell the tale of Kamkwamba’s imaginative childhood turned dark by famine and how he was determined to create a solution that he could make from nothing.
While blood is thicker than water, beeswax and honey keep people together.
Sue Monk Kidd’s auspicious debut novel revolves around young and petulant Lily Owens as she navigates life on her abusive father’s peach farm with the blurred memory of her mother’s accidental death. Set in South Carolina in a time of overt racial tension, her black housekeeper and nearest hope to motherly-love, Rosaleen, scandalizes the town by registering to vote. Lily springs Rosaleen from the hospital she’s kept at and the two go on a quest to uncover her mother’s past, which eventually leads them to three motherly sisters, The Boatwright’s, who own a honey farm. Lily and Rosaleen are introduced to their memorable world of bees, honey, female divinity, and womanhood.
“Lydia is dead. But they don’t know this yet…”
With these haunting words, Celeste Ng begins her spellbinding 2014 debut novel, Everything I Never Told You, a psychological yet gorgeously literary thriller centered on a Chinese-American family living in 1970s Ohio. While Lydia’s death ostensibly forms the crux of the novel, the fragmented pieces of life she leaves behind constitute the true story.
The book is a meditation on the interactions between family and society that culminates in
