29/05/2026
📚📚 copy/paste from a keen
reader's personal review - yes we have this book in our Karamea Community Library along with 'A ministry of utmost happiness' by the same wonderful author 📚📚
...I finished this book four days ago, and I still can't stop thinking about it.
That's not something I say lightly. I read a lot. Most books come and go. But The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy crawled inside my chest and hasn't left. I find myself staring out windows. I find myself remembering lines I didn't even underline. I find myself feeling heavy in a way that isn't sad exactly—more like haunted by beauty.
I picked it up because I'd seen it on every "must-read" list for years. But I kept putting it off. Literary fiction. Heavy themes. Postcolonial India. It felt like homework. And then one rainy evening, I ran out of excuses. So I opened it.
And from the first page, I was gone.
The story, in the simplest terms
It's about twins—Estha and Rahel—growing up in a small town in Kerala, in the late 1960s. Their family is fractured, fragile, full of rules nobody says out loud. There's an English cousin who drowns. There's a forbidden love between an untouchable and a woman from a higher caste. There's a mother who tries to hold everything together and a grandmother who believes in the tyranny of respectability.
But the plot isn't really the point. The feeling is the point.
Roy writes like nobody else. Her sentences twist and loop back on themselves. She breaks grammar like it owes her money. She repeats phrases until they become prayers or curses. "Things can change in a day." "Naught. Nowt. Nothing." It's disorienting at first. But then it clicks. You realize she's not writing like an English professor. She's writing like memory actually works—fragmented, emotional, looping back to the moments that broke us.
What broke me
There's a scene about halfway through. I won't spoil it, but it involves a boat, a river, and two children who don't fully understand what's happening to the adults they love. I read it twice. Then I closed the book and just sat in the dark for a while. My husband asked if I was okay. I couldn't answer.
That's the thing about this book. The "big" tragedies are devastating, yes. But what wrecked me more were the small things. A child being told to put his sadness away because it's inconvenient. A woman's love being treated like a crime. The way families silently agree to never speak of certain things again, as if silence could undo what happened.
Roy understands something that most of us spend our whole lives learning: it's not the grand disasters that destroy us. It's the small cruelties. The daily betrayals. The love we were too afraid to reach for.
The language itself
I have to talk about the prose, because it's breathtaking. Listen to this:
"The sky was the color of butterflies. The river was the color of old dreams."
Or this:
"It was a time when the unthinkable became the thinkable and the impossible became the possible."
She writes like a poet who got lost in a novel and decided to stay. Every sentence is crafted. Every word feels chosen. I found myself reading whole passages out loud, just to hear how they sounded.
But it's not just pretty. It's painful. She uses beauty to break your heart. She'll describe a butterfly, then a beating. A river, then a betrayal. You're never allowed to forget that loveliness and cruelty live in the same world, often in the same house.
Why you should read it
This book is not for everyone. If you need plot twists and happy endings, look elsewhere. If you want clear heroes and villains, this will frustrate you. Roy gives you none of that. She gives you messy, broken, achingly human people who love badly and fail beautifully.
But if you've ever felt like an outsider in your own family. If you've ever loved someone you weren't supposed to love. If you've ever watched something terrible happen and been too small or too scared to stop it. You will see yourself in these pages.
It's also, quietly, a book about India—about caste, about colonialism, about the ways history lives inside our bones even when we pretend it doesn't. Roy doesn't lecture. She just shows you. And you understand. I gave this book five stars, but that feels insufficient. Five stars is for books you really like. The God of Small Things is a book that marks you. You won't be the same person after reading it.
It won the Booker Prize in 1997, deservedly. But more than that, it has earned its place as one of those rare novels that people press into each other's hands with a whispered, "You have to read this."
Now I'm one of those people.
So here. Take this review as me pressing it into your hands.
You have to read this.
