Book Review: The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy ★★☆☆☆

I did not care for this one bit. I found it cloying, infantilising, and far too circuitous. It starts off as a bit of an overwritten melodrama, where every phrase is a delicious flower waiting to bloom, but ends up being a over-sugared mess with a rotten heart. Parts are just exhausting to read, with no time to catch your breath between scenes. That can work in some books when spaced out - here I just found it annoying. My main problem with it, though, is that it feels like it is entirely exposition. Because of the (unnecessarily) jumbled order of the story, every paragraph feels like it is introducing us to something or someone. Rather than progress the plot, I felt like I was being drip-fed morsels for what was coming up. In the end, the story just isn't interesting enough to support that. Parts of the writing are gorgeous, but they're in service of so little that it seems like an unfair sleight of hand; you're too busy admiring the prose to realise how dull and uneventful…