The God of Small Things

The book I read for my independent reading was The God of Small Things. This is unlike any book that I have read before, but I am not sure if that is a good thing or not. Although the story was good, there were many things that I did not like about this book.

The first being that I found it slightly confusing at times, the author did not have much consistency in a lot of her writing. I really did not like how the time frames were constantly changing. If it had some kind of organization to the way that they changed and skipped, it wouldn't be so bad. But that was not the case. It would jump to years in the past with no warning, and it would take a bit of reading to catch onto where exactly I am in terms of chronological order. This was the cause of most of my confusion with the story. It had just a lot of what I feel, is unnecessary skipping around.

Also, I have learned to pay attention to pay attention to the format and organization of the writing. I was trying to do that with this book. There were many instances where there would be a word or a phrase isolated from the rest of the context, usually emphasizing importance, or tie into some deeper meaning, or have something behind it. She would do this often, and I would be unable to figure out why, and for what meaning, if any, so I often felt as if I was missing some deeper meaning/message. I was actually unable to find any deeper meaning within the entire novel itself, if there was meant to be one, it was completely lost to me.

I really feel like there is a lack of consistency with this book that was hard for me to overlook. Her tone seems to change throughout the story, the point of view changes often, also, she refers to Rahel and Estha as "we", then will change later on, referring to them as "they".

Maybe this book is actually some really complicated book, requiring someone of much more knowledge of analysis than me to figure out. Maybe everything I have pointed out actually does have a meaning to it, but I am just completely unaware of it. But all in all, I am just unsure of how I feel about the book. I don't hate it, and I don't love it.