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From the award-winning author of Marriage of a Thousand Lies comes a brilliantly written, globe-spanning novel about identity, faith, family, and sexuality.
In Tamil Nadu, India, a boy is born with blue skin. His father sets up an ashram, and the family makes a living off of the pilgrims who seek the child's blessings and miracles, believing young Kalki to be the tenth human incarnation of the Hindu god Vishnu. In Kalki's tenth year, he is confronted with three trials that will test his power and prove his divine status and, his father tells him, spread his fame worldwide. While he seems to pass them, Kalki begins to question his divinity.
Over the next decade, his family unravels, and every relationship he relied on—father, mother, aunt, uncle, cousin—starts falling apart. Traveling from India to the underground rock scene of New York City, Blue-Skinned Gods explores ethnic, gender, and sexual identities, and spans continents and faiths, in an expansive and heartfelt look at the need for belief in our globally interconnected world.
BookBrowse Review
"Blue Skinned Gods is an exploration of faith, family, and identity through an astonishing story about a boy who is brought up as the reincarnation of Vishnu under the controlling weight of his father. However, the fantastic background and trauma that that the main character goes through in being used as a false god are never fully realized in spite of the strength of Sindu's prose and her ability as a writer." - Jennifer Hon Khalaf
Other Reviews
"Sindu's marvelous coming-of-age story features a young healer in Tamil Nadu, believed to be an incarnation of the Hindu god Vishnu, who eventually breaks away from his domineering father... The imagery is vivid...and the slow-burn narrative by the end becomes incandescent. Sindu's stunning effort more than delivers on her initial promise." - Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Throughout the book, Sindu's prose has a textured intricacy that never becomes florid. Occasionally, though, she does slip into a slightly didactic tone when explaining Hindu practices...[T]hese are minor quibbles for a novel that so admirably skates between insight and pathos, acuity, and poignancy. Remarkably moving in its explorations of faith, doubt, and what it might mean to be a charlatan." - Kirkus Reviews
"An explosive, provoking examination of what we are forced to or choose to believe to be true." - Booklist
"A thoughtful exploration of contemporary religion and the relations between modern culture and tradition." - Foreword Reviews
"SJ Sindu has written another brilliant novel in Blue-Skinned Gods. This time, she tells the story of a boy with blue skin who is trying to be the god everyone tells him he is...Here is a novel about the bonds between brothers, a deceptive tyrant and son, a mother who doesn't know how to save herself or her child, a boy and how he yearns for his young loves, and so much more. The richness of this story will take hold of you and never let go." - Roxane Gay
"Sj Sindu has given us a true gift in Kalki Sami and his journey. A coming-of-age story wielding philosophical, historical, and emotional moments full of passion, vividly described, Blue-Skinned Gods is one of the most original and beautiful novels I've read in a long time." - Brandon Hobson, author of Where the Dead Sit Talking and The Removed
"Blue-Skinned Gods is a marvel of a novel. S.J. Sindu has created a cast of characters so compelling it was difficult to set the book down. I was enraptured by the careful twining of these lives: a manipulative father, a mother who loves her son to the point of agony, the joy and despair of tender first love, the pressure of knowing your destiny and the devastation of losing everything at once. It is a true joy to encounter a book so beautifully written. The prose is lush and stunning, the narrative wildly gripping. Sindu is a phenomenal writer and Blue-Skinned Gods is a treasure." - Kristen Arnett, New York Times bestselling author of Mostly Dead Things
This information about Blue-Skinned Gods was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
SJ Sindu is the author of the novel Marriage of a Thousand Lies, which won the Publishing Triangle Edmund White Debut Fiction Award, was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award, and was an ALA Stonewall Honor Book; as well as the hybrid fiction and nonfiction chapbook I Once Met You But You Were Dead. She holds an MA in English from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and a PhD in English and Creative Writing from Florida State University. Sindu teaches at the University of Toronto Scarborough.
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