to much happiness wasn't good for you; it was bound to be followed by great sorrow, as the world tried to keep the balance." Blue mangoes, blue mangoes!", urged Gangoose McGee. "Won't you please try one? They're fresh and they're free!". I could have forgiven some of the clunky writing and wild leaps of plot if I had cared at all about any of the characters. None of the three main characters is remotely likeable or interesting. "Unlikeable" I could forgive, but I never had the sense that the author really understood his characters' motivations, either. Stuff happens to them, and they have big revelations, but none of it is tied into anything we've been shown or understood about these characters. The bad guys are bad, bad, bad (particularly the Anglo-Indian hussy in the final section of the novel), the good guys are pretty bad too although the author seems to think they are just well-rounded, and overall, by the end I was just rooting for the tiger.

Where the book fails, in my opinion, is taking off from where Chevathar ends. While mapping Aaron and Daniel's lives, there are too many elements coming into play, so all the 'showing' from the 1st part becomes outright 'telling'. Aaron and Daniel don't grow in front of your eyes, you are told they've grown up like that, so you can't quite relate to them, especially not when there's an illogical making-up happening between two brothers who loathed each other for life. The weakest character development was that of the senior Daniel. Perhaps, Ramadoss should've been given a voice and Daniel's story told from his eyes. Doraipuram as a section failed to impress. At the moment of his triumph, he had escaped the world, the hundreds of little things we say and do to ourselves to bind us down, make us helpless little worms, who on their deathbeds only remember and lament what they always wanted to do, but never had the courage for." The Mangifera casturi, among others, are grown at the Fairchild Farm in Homestead, Florida as part of our living collection. The genes of this valuable tree have been used to create new hybrids. Dr. Ledesma is working on a breeding program and hundreds of new trees are the progeny now under evaluation. She is looking for the perfect mango for a new generation — mangoes resistant to diseases than can be grown free of heavy chemical products, but are also delicious and nutritious.

Thematically, the story is more about events than ideas, and more about a specific set of characters than about the meaning of these events and characters. Ultimately there is no resolution. We know the outcome of the history in which the story is set – a true history, but what is right and what is wrong, or whether Aaron’s engagement or Daniel’s sense of family and the personal is right or not is left open. Kannan finds a kind of sense of purpose in home – almost a Panglossian tilling of his garden: “I’m here, it is the place of my heart”, and perhaps that is the ultimate theme of the book – to stay home, and become yourself, and till your own garden/grow your mangoes. In any case, Kannan’ return home is reasonably satisfying as an ending, even if the ultimate struggles of his country are to continue beyond the setting of this story. For centuries, maybe millennia, mangoes have been cultivated by humans to encourage the qualities we value: less fiber, greater and sweeter flesh, smaller seed, and in more recent times, longer shelf life so we can ship mangoes to our friends up north and have them last. But at any rate, the varieties we have now mostly still fall under the same species: Mangifera indica. He had never thought that his brother's rejection of him would grieve him so much or linger so long, but it did, deep within him, rising up from time to time. At such times, he would stop whatever he was doing and immerse himself completely in his sense of loss. Long experience had taught him that this was the best way to treat wounds of the past. Experience them fully, and then set them aside to resume the daily business of living."

This multigenerational family epic follows the tradition of Vikram Seth's A SUITBALE BOY and Gabriel Gárcia Márquez's ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE. The novel, however, possesses neither the lucidity of Seth nor the sheer poetry of Márquez. Artistic License – Space: In Blue Mangoes, the mangoes come from the moon, even though there are no plants on the mood in reality.

Does Not Like Spam: Zigzagged. It seems that Truman doesn't like ice cream, but then it's revealed that he's never tried it because he's convinced he'd hate it. Eventually, he tries some and is just neutral on it. We’re all sort of aware of the multitude of mango varieties, even available at your average supermarket. “Cogshall,”“Champagne,”“Angie,”“Haden” are names we may have seen. Try “Fairchild” if you haven’t already—it’s wonderful. But not to worry if you don’t know all the mango varieties, there are only about 600. Joe could light up any room, bring people alive . . . well, you know, people who possess such great gifts that they seem to be able to do things without worrying about their own lives or fortunes, as weedy little people like us do?"

The Good Book was right: a man must leave his father and mother and cleave to his wife . . . for she will do him good and not evil all the days of her life." The book might as well be called Dysfunctional Fathers and Submissive Mothers. I did have a problem with the way there was no strong motivation for Daniel and Kannan to return to Chevathar. I don't buy the 'male lineage love in DNA' crap. Daniel was pretty much brought up by his mother and his maternal grandfather, so why not show this loyalty to Nagerkoil, where his mother was from? Wasn't he 50% from there too? As for Kannan, there was no connection with Chevathar for him. Despite the flaws in character development, Davidar's prose, for the most part, flows at a rapid, fluid clip. At times, however, his usually lyrical writing plods along at a most cumbersome pace --- a tiresomely detailed description of how to brew tea immediately comes to mind. But the author eloquently conveys the raw beauty and power of the Indian landscape, and the cycle of the seasons and day turning into night provide a sense of the wheel turning and the steady progression of time. The narrative is never propelled by stakes larger than the machismo of each generation’s patriarch (to whom one of the book’s three parts is respectively devoted), diminishing its significance to strictly parochial, and its women to unquestioning, sentimental caricatures. It is difficult to empathise with these privileged men who seem to be driven by precious little besides their shallow pride—particularly ugly is their self-interested endorsement of British colonisation or complete disengagement with national politics (Aaron being the only exception, but even his struggle is relegated to the margins). And what's with the tiger? I understand the need for an analogy to denote a character coming to a take-off point to hunt for a deeper inner meaning (Aaron had his well. Daniel had his first leech patient.) but this was just not quite enough because Kannan just whined through the whole thing.Downplayed in T.D.'s imagination, where Alice and Truman are old, and he's mostly wearing the same clothes but with a tie and a dress shirt instead of a T-shirt, and she's still wearing green and brown, but with long pants instead of shorts and a sweater instead of a t-shirt. Helen Lorraine and T.D. tried to make a fake ending to break up Alice and Truman's row, but Alice knew it was a fake as it was written in chalk. It went like this:

Pun: After reading the fake book, Alice says that "something smells fishy, and it's not the blue mangoes". The title of this book is what drew my attention.. it is derived from a particular type of mango that thrives in the soil of the place this story is set in and is called Neelam meaning blue.. Aerith and Bob: A strange example in Blue Mangoes. Each bird has one normal name and one weird name: Nicholas Mellow (normal first name, weird last name) and Gangoose McGee (weird first name, normal last name). At the cafe, Helen and T.D. tell Alice to let the situation go, but she refuses. Truman approaches, but Alice refuses to let him sit at the table, saying that it's only for people who've tried something before deciding they dislike it. Then, she growls and walks off, then Truman walks off too. The book is divided into three sections, each focusing on one member of the Dorai family. The first book is about Soloman, his attempts to halt the outbreak of caste wars, and his loss of power in the face of a changing India. The second book looks at Daniel, Soloman’s peace loving son, who becomes a famous doctor following in the footsteps of his mentor Dr Pillai, and inventor of Moonwhite Thylam: “make your face shine like the Pongal moon”. There is also Aaron, the angry freedom fighter, and his struggles for India’s independence. The third book, Pulimed, focuses on Daniel’s son Kannan, who falls in love with an Anglo Indian Helen at University in Madras. When his father doesn’t approve of Helen, Kannan leaves his home to become a plantation manager on the tea estates in Pulamed. The men are reasonably well drawn, and Soloman’s physical strength, and attempts to moderate between his traditional role, and the changes taking place around him drive the plot forward, as does Aaron’s anger and pain, which colour his political focus, and make Daniel’s focus on family and internal matters seem more realistic than the flimsy and shifting ethics of the political world into which Daniel refuses to be drawn. Kannan’s attempts to fit into British society, partly a product of his father’s political apathy, and his struggles for self-actualisation in the face of his wife’s unhappiness and British “superiority” are reasonably poignant. Charity is also reasonable interesting as a character, trying to maintain her sense of decorum and pride in a country that dramatically devalues her sex. Her descent into insanity is at least as powerful as Aaron’s pain and role as a political assassin.

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Being a member of the community and caste mentioned in the book enabled me to appreciate the book at a totally different level and live vicariously through the experiences of many of the characters who I could relate to.