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Blue-Skinned Gods by SJ Sindu [in Booklist]

For always, Kalki – with his matching blue skin – has been told he’s a god, the tenth and final incarnation of Vishnu. His godliness supports the family’s Tamil Nadu ashram, where he lives with his controlling father, loving mother, uncle and his wife, and companion-cousin Lakshman. In Kalki’s tenth year, the Sri Kalki Purana – “the Hindu text that prophesied [his] birth and life” – decrees three deity-proving trials. Kalki heals young Roopa and calls down a white horse from the sky. But the third challenge goes unproven, eclipsed by cleaving: half his family leaves when Kalki can’t heal his aunt.

Still, his believers remain devout. The ashram grows in spite of the dissolution of family life exacerbated by infidelity, depression, and a forbidden first love. On a world tour at age 22, Lakshman finds Kalki in New York City and their meeting shatters his very existence.

As if channeling the prevarications dominating her debut novel, Marriage of a Thousand Lies (2017), SJ Sindu’s sophomore title (despite a slow first half) proves to be an explosive, provoking examination of what we are forced to or choose to believe to be true.

Review: “Fiction,” Booklist, September 15, 2021

Readers: Adult

Published: 2021

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