Reviews and Comments

Toward the end of this book there's a short parenthetical aside about two young twin boys learning a board game. It says "(They are in the swell of their personalities, in their purest moment; they are impossible.)" It's a sweet moment and a dash of language that I found beautiful and poetic in its frivolity, and all too rare in this 600-page book. It comes just before a catastrophe that took the preceding 600 pages to convince us of its significance, so alien are the values at play to those of us unversed in the nuances of early-20th-century Indian caste-based society.

I really only know the caste system (broadly, ignorantly) as an unjust hierarchy that consigns a subset of people to squalor; this novel puts us in the shoes—the sandals? when one character acquires shoes they seem to be an unorthodox symbol of his progressivism re: caste—of people highly invested in it. But it certainly doesn't make their attitudes about it sympathetic, and I'm pretty sure it's not trying to. Ultimately it's just the story of a family in the midst of a time of strife- and division-causing political upheaval as various family members stake out their positions, and in that regard it works as a sort of anthropology study. Having read Howards End recently for my book club, I suppose The Toss of a Lemon was kind of an Indian version of that book, in a way. But the context was just too unfamiliar to me, and the story didn't place me in it in a way that made the characters or the stakes relatable.

Pretty well put together and kept me reading, but the characters were two-dimensional and the prose was serviceable at best. I read this with my book club because it was set in Seattle; it didn't have me super eager to read any more Baldacci.

Much of this book was like talking to Measurehead in Disco Elysium. Just pages and pages and pages of the absolute most inane racist shit. Really brings home how much Abraham Lincoln hella did not end racism in America with a stroke of the pen. I read this for my book club because someone wanted an answer to the question of "How did we get from Reconstruction to where we are today?" This book doesn't explain it all—what book could?—but it accounts for a hell of a lot of it.

Plot, characters, themes, all flawlessly executed. A total package. Structurally really similar to Cloud Atlas—apparently an intentional borrowing on the author's part—but hangs together as a single work a lot better than Cloud Atlas did.

Well, the adults don't come off great in this book, but I was really won over by it nonetheless.