The Parcel

What else can I say besides the fact that this book was sad. There was just so much sadness that even the ending, which was I guess the silver lining, did not cheer me up even a little bit. Madhu's whole life is just a huge mess. I feel terrible for her, and I knew that one of the things this book was going to do was to try to redeem her at the end. I could not think of her as redeemed however, as I had just read 200 pages of how she psychologically breaks children into submission to prepare them for prostitution. The epilogue really shows how just a short period of time with her had messed up the girl in ways that will probably never be fixed.

I liked at least that they show just how messed up Madhu's thoughts about it are. She believes that she is doing them a favour. It becomes less of an explanation and more of her trying to convince herself that what she is doing is a gift.

I found it to be a bit slow, and going off on a lot of different tangents that were not really imperative to the story.

I think I would still recommend it, as long as you can handle a whole description of the process of her being castrated. That was quite hard to get through.