House of Blue Mangoes, The

Product Information

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.

A wonderful epic that centres all around the Dorai family's adventures and lives and is finally brought full circle in an exciting climax involving Kanaan.

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 was exhilarated by the traveling . . . Aaron could now understand at least a part of it: the excitement of new places opening up his mind, the sense of freedom that anonymity provided . . . " What I really liked about the writing was that there was little exposition and explanation. For example, Davidar does not explicitly the reader things like the fact that a wedding thaali comes from Hindu practices but is used by Tamil Christians as well. He also does not point out to the way people are named from both the Bible and Hindu scripture: Apart from Solomon, Daniel and Aaron, there is Ramadoss (meaning one who serves Ram) or Kannan (the diminutive associated with Krishna). Davidar doesn't try to explain how India functions and that is the best thing about the book. If the reader is as clueless as the beleaguered British - portrayed with both sympathy and simmering anger in the book - the author doesn't seem to mind. Feud Episode: At one point, Alice refers to Truman as Helen and T.D.'s friend, but not her own, implying she doesn't see him as a friend anymore.

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. It is the end of the 19th century and headman Solomon Dorai of the village of Chevathar in Southern India is desperately fighting against a world that is changing and to hold the remaining members of his family together and for them to uphold the traditional ways of their lifestyle but against the political and social unrest at this period this is nigh on impossible. Strange Minds Think Alike: Despite having opposing views, both Alice and Truman manage to end up saying, "It's not the ice cream; it's the principle of the thing." Blue Mangoes is a story featured in Ice Scream and Milo's Reading Buddy. It focuses on a birdlike creature called Gangoose McGee trying to get another birdlike character called Nicholas Mellow to eat blue mangoes.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. However there are also about 69 other Mangifera species, where the second of the binomial name, the “specific epithet,” like in Mangifera indica will be something different, something like indicating how human beings and Neanderthals are closely related, but are/were not the same species. We never really get under the skin of the characters though – never really get close enough, even to Daniel and Kannan, who are the real focal points of the stories – there is just too much going on, and we have too little insight into their passions. The poetic writing is reserved for natural descriptions, and the characters inner world left more or less untouched.