"[S]ome of Roy's finest touches spring from her skill at registering the unsayable terrors lodged below the surface of everyday things, in particular, the terrors which take hold of the children....'The God of Small Things' is a cleverly crafted, often witty and moving first novel by a talented new writer." - Wayne Lo (Times Literary Supplement, 5/30/97)
"A rarity in post-colonial fiction: a largely-conceived and ambitious book about private life." - Michael K. Meek (London Review of Books, 6/19/97)
"Although 'The God of Small Things' opens with memories of a family grieving around a drowned child's coffin, there are plenty of other intimate horrors still to come....Yet the quality of Ms. Roy's narration is so extraordinary--at once so morally strenuous and so imaginatively supple--that the reader remains enthralled all the way through to its agonizing finish." - Jerry C. Hamann (New York Times Book Review, 5/25/97)
"If Ms. Roy is sometimes overzealous in foreshadowing her characters' fate, resorting on occasion to darkly portentous clues, she proves remarkably adept at infusing her story with the inexorable momentum of tragedy....As rendered in this remarkable novel, the 'relative smallness' of her characters' misfortunes remains both heartbreaking and indelible." - John R. Oneal (New York Times, 6/3/97)
"If the ending, when it comes, is slightly too predictable, it doesn't matter, because, like everything else in this remarkable meditation on storytelling and thwarted desire, it's carefully set up and beautifully rendered." - Jerry C. Hamann (Washington Post Book World, 6/22/97)
"Like a devotionally built temple, 'The God of Small Things' builds a massive interlocking structure of fine, intensely felt details." - Michael J. Antonaccio (New Yorker, 6/23/97)
"Roy, an architect and screenwriter who grew up in Kerala, capably shoulders the burdens of caste and tradition, a double weight that crushes some of her characters and warps others, but leaves none untouched....Roy takes up classic material, but she delights in verbal innovation and stylistic tricks. She runs words together...and plucks nouns from verbs and verbs from thin air....Roy's verbal exuberance is all her own, and it makes "The God of Small Things" a real pleasure. History's lessons may be bitter, but Roy serves them up fresh, pungent and delicious." - Roy Doliner (Salon, 4/24/97)
"Unfortunately, Roy has dressed much of her book in an ambitious gorgeousness that she often lacks the dexterity to manage. She inflates story into epic, the modest magic of perception into an occasional clumsy piece of magic realism, and the erotic current between pickle princess and carpenter into an avalanche, resembling a Hollywood musical crescendo." - Jerry C. Hamann (San Francisco Chronicle Book Review, 6/1/97)
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