What a strange book. Set in India, paternal twins are involved in the death o their cousin - something that affects them as adults. The story is told by jumping back and forth in time, from when the twins were only children to when they are thirty. That's not so unusual - it's a common tactic of novelists, but the author dribbles out the facts of the tragedy in small bits of premonition here and there. Here's an example:
He assumed, not without reason, that he would be the first in his family to follow in his mother's wake. He would learn otherwise. Soon. Too soon.
Which, of course, gets the reader thinking who the other members of the family are and why they might die. The author as narrator is giving us privileged information that only the author knows. She does this constantly, as a way of keeping the reader interested while she paints the picture of India and the lives of the children and the adults around them.
It worked very well for me for about 200 pages - then I got impatient with it. Even near the end, when the reader has discovered most of what happened, the author still is digressing into the lives of peripheral characters when I just wanted the torture of not knowing what happened to be over.
And yet, there is no single scene that describes the tragedy completely. It's all told in bits and pieces, which ultimately detracted from the final pages for me.
One thing the author can do very well is write from the viewpoint of a female child. She was perfect.
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