I don’t know how I felt about this one. It was a book club pick so I probably wouldn’t have picked it up on my own, but the concept was interesting. It’s about a boy born with blue skin whose parents raise him to believe he is the tenth reincarnation of Vishnu. But it’s very much set in the contemporary modern world.

The book is mostly focused on Kalki’s childhood. At times, we jump into random bits in the future - and I enjoyed those little hints until the end when I realized we were never going to get to actually see that future play out. I would have liked to see more of his time as an adult on his own and less of his time as a younger adult with adult Lakshman. The first 3/4 of the book were almost too slow but then the last 1/4 felt way too rushed. Concepts - like Kalki trying to understand why people have faith - would be introduced but not explored. As a result, I really lacked engagement with Kalki’s journey in the last part, and it ended up highlighting all the flaws in the first 3/4. So while it started off strong, I ended up feeling pretty lukewarm over it overall.

Still, there’s a lot of interesting characters and concepts explored in this book - religion, race, castes, sexuality, queerness. The book also has a heavy focus on the relationships between brothers, mother and son, romantic relationships, and Kalki’s friendships. It’s also about the impact of his father’s deceit and how his decisions affected everyone. But at times this book just had too much loss and betrayal. Basically every adult in this book just uses and exploits Kalki for their own gain. Very bleak. Again, I would have liked to see how he got from that bleak point to apparently teaching Tamil at a university where there were at least hints of a happy adult Kalki.

Finally I'll just mention that as an Anishinaabe woman, I thought the land acknowledgment at the end was very interesting!