Room on the Roof

"The Room on the Roof" by Ruskin Bond is a pretty coming of age novel that grapples with questions of identity, home, and longing. Though clearly the author's first novel, I found myself really enjoying its characters and the raw, personal voice of the novelist. The book is semi-autobiographical and captures Bond's desire to find a place for himself in the world that he had grew up in but was not meant to be a part. What makes it a strong coming-of-age novel is how it can tell that very universal story of finding the self and telling it with very specific details. And like all good children's literature, it does not shy away from violence and darker corners of life. Written when he was seventeen and living away from India for the first time, you can see the author attempting to recapture snippets and moments of his childhood. The book tells the story of Rusty, an Anglo-India boy living in Dehradun just after Indian independence. He lives a stifling existence among the dying Anglo community and longs for adventure. He makes friends in the bazaar, runs away from home, falls in love, and comes to accept that India is truly his home. I don't know if I was fully invested in the story and there were some narrative leaps that I did not find plausible. I also don't like the third person limited narrator - he goes into the mind of characters when convenient but not consistently. But the beauty of the images, especially in his descriptions of nature and the world around, more than make up for the flaws in style.