PositiveLos Angeles Review of Books... wonderful descriptive passages...bring to life the ancient city of Kashi and its age-old customs and rituals, the conglomeration of devotees, the constantly bustling streets, and the holy river Ganga ... Champaneri’s sprawling novel delicately navigates the relations of life and death, childhood and memory, love, hate, friendship, human bonding, and relationships that are beyond human understanding. The most interesting aspect of the novel is the interaction between the natural and the supernatural. While the general tone of the novel approaches social realism, the heart of the work is fantastical ... While an acceptance of the religio-mythical structure within which the characters exist is palpable from the beginning of The City of Good Death, such qualities never overwhelm the strongly drawn characters grounded in known reality ... This smooth transition between the natural and supernatural exhibits a sincerity of style that, while suggesting symbolisms of love, loss, and human bonding (as hinted at by the book’s other epigraph by Rabindranath Tagore), also endorses a mythical worldview. While there is nothing wrong in telling a ghost story in a straightforward manner (after all, readers enter a ghost story suspending their disbeliefs), the overt social realism and psychological realism employed to relate such a supernatural tale sometimes create an Orientalist effect resembling the \'timeless and spiritual\' India often perpetuated by Western literature and media ... the best quality of the work is its descriptive passages narrated in lush and evocative prose. Wonderful images—languid mornings over Ganga, bustling bazaars, the awkward seriousness of the death hostel, the green fields of Pramesh’s village, crowded railway carriages—pervade this voluminous work[.]
