Book Review: The Association of Small Bombs by Karan Mahajan

I bought this book with my Christmas money and just finished it today, which should tell you how much of a page-turner it was (not much!).

This book had some beautiful writing, some phrases that I had to stop and reread, absorb and enjoy. But overall, I just didn't get invested in the story.

The book starts in 1996, with the explosion of small bomb in Delhi. Two Hindu boys are killed in the blast, which also injures their best friend Mansoor, a young Muslim. Both sets of parents are liberals who enjoy a friendship that transcends religious boundaries, and yet their attitudes shift in the aftermath of the blast. Narration jumps from character to character as people navigate their grief; we also get to hear the story from the point of view of the bomber.

Delhi is almost a character of its own in the story; in my opinion Mahajan's descriptions of the city are among the finest passages in the book.

He describes an office building with windows so old and congealed that "they were quietly weeping light...The tables piled with fresh-smelling paper. Above all this, the enormous distant ceiling fans that shivered like the antennae of insects and patrolled the sprawling empire of paperwork with their breeze..."

And outside, in the city, "a car had broken down between two flowing gutters. Beneath it, a runway of needles, discarded by the hospital, glistened in the sunshine, the garbage ponderously overflowing, everything protected by the rusty, aggressive fragrance of the air conditioner, in whose lungs the krill of pollution stuck."

But despite these and several other lovely word clusters, I can't give this book more than three stars. It just didn't capture my interest much.