RaveThe Guardian\"Gidla’s beautiful book, parts of which are as deeply absorbing as anything I’ve read, comes to this question of self-consciousness and how we think of and express ourselves from different directions. Ants Among Elephants is an account of Gidla’s family, from the life of her grandparents to her own ... Gidla’s language and imagination are disjunctive and estranging. This makes the writing, at its best, more absorbing than any event described by it.\
Katherine Boo
RaveThe GuardianFor Katherine Boo, working on this intimate account of life in Annawadi was slow, uncertain and painful in a variety of ways ... Her own absence from the encounters with her biographees, the complete and unflagging access to their thoughts and speech, the decision to adopt the novelistic approach – perhaps these, and not the depressing nature of writing about a microcosm of abject poverty within a booming India, are the greatest risks Boo takes ... a novelist's intelligence, with a shrewd eye for vanity, and an understanding that everything is informed by compromise – keeps her tale from losing its grounding in reality ... Boo, in letting go of her story, in dwelling with it relatively briefly in her book's 250 pages (in contrast to the years she spent with the slum-dwellers), allows it to resonate with us as a small classic of contemporary writing.
