Where to start ... Arundhati Roy's writing style is highly derivative and heavily indebted to magical realism and Isabella Allende in particular. It lacks originality in style and content. It employs the over-used device of a character returning home and engaging in a series of flashbacks that eventually lead to the present ... and worst of all, buys into the falsehood of children being wise beyond their years (gag!). It's hard to feel any sympathy for a book populated with bourgeois characters that are each conveniently equipped with uncanny eccentricities. I fault the editor who seems to have locked her read pen in her desk when she should have been doing her job. This work should be edited down to a nice ten page short story.