MixedThe New York Times Book ReviewThere is an unevenness to the novel’s texture and tone, deriving in part from a failure to employ retrospection effectively to either heighten tension or illuminate the characters’ actions and motivations ... Gunesekera artfully renders the unequal relationship between the two boys, and the fractures within their families, but the external world never quite coheres with their interiors ... The dialogue is often similarly unconvincing. Tedious metaphors, drawing comparisons between birds and humans, cages and countries, overwhelm sentences. Characters such as Niromi, a girl Kairo worries may come between him and Jay, and Channa, a Tamil boy Jay rescues from bullies, aren’t fully fleshed out. Others appear to have an unfortunate predilection for making ominous remarks that portend the novel’s conclusion ... The writing is most successful when Gunesekera reins in the polemics and refracts through the young Kairo’s eyes the subtle ways in which divisions of class can manifest themselves.
