The blue skinned boy Kalki is raised in an isolated ashram with his parents, aunt, uncle and cousin and spends his days providing healing prayers and instruction. While he appears to pass the three tests of his godhood, what makes more of an impact are the three losses - his cousin, his love, his mother. Finding what he really is he is still left to find who he might be. The end is rather abrupt. ( )

Highly recommend this excellent book!

Blue-Skinned Gods tells the story of a baby born with blue skin who then spends the next 20 plus years living in an ashram in India and being worshipped as a god. We first meet Kalki the blue-skinned boy, having slight misgivings about his holiness as his 10th birthday approaches. But he has little reason to doubt his divinity, until, over the next decade, he slowly loses those most important to him: his best friend and cousin, his love interest, and finally his mother.

While on his “world tour” as a mystic, Kalki’s shocking true identity is revealed. Although he manages to escape from his charlatan father, he has lost – literally – everything. No longer having any sense of self, he engages in reckless behavior with his Americanized cousin. But Kalki has a good heart, and while he recognizes he is no god he seems to be unable to get others to disavow it. This dichotomy is both confusing and hurtful to him.

Sindu deftly walks the tightrope between storytelling and plausibility. Even western readers will have trouble all out rejecting Kalki’s beliefs. I found many parallels between this book with Kite Runner and Cutting for Stone. All three are riches-to-rags stories; all three have protagonists who find themselves abandoned in a foreign land; and all three share betrayals of lost love. ( )

The Publisher Says: From the award-winning author of Marriage of a Thousand Lies comes a brilliantly written, globe-spanning novel about identity, faith, family, and sexuality.

In Tamil Nadu, India, a boy is born with blue skin. His father sets up an ashram, and the family makes a living off of the pilgrims who seek the child’s blessings and miracles, believing young Kalki to be the tenth human incarnation of the Hindu god Vishnu. In Kalki’s tenth year, he is confronted with three trials that will test his power and prove his divine status and, his father tells him, spread his fame worldwide. While he seems to pass them, Kalki begins to question his divinity.

Over the next decade, his family unravels, and every relationship he relied on—father, mother, aunt, uncle, cousin—starts falling apart. Traveling from India to the underground rock scene of New York City, Blue-Skinned Gods explores ethnic, gender, and sexual identities, and spans continents and faiths, in an expansive and heartfelt look at the need for belief in our globally interconnected world.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: A child is fed a diet of lies by his parents and all the adults around him. They seek many things from their lies, and he seeks only his truth.

Come for the writing, stay for the story...the sentences are lovely things, shining and glowing with the light of inspiration. The story's the one we all need to hear at this juncture, the one about the abuse of religion in service of religiosity and greed. The cost to this genuinely beautiful soul, Kalki, is so huge...the relationships he can not save are all built on the sand of lies.

What makes this story so extraordinarily resonant is that we're all surrounded by lies all day every day. Yes, it's true, Kalki's lies are costly to those he's lying to...not being a god and still trying to heal people is wrong...but he told the truth he had been sold all his life by the liars he was raised by and among. Kalki, unlike all the rest of us, has the weight of the literal world on him, has expectations of miracles mounded on him. That's his excuse for buying into the lies he's surrounded by. What's yours? What's mine?

The questions that this brutally honest look in the mirror of a story raises are urgently in need of everyone's answers, delivered with the honesty and the anger that Kalki uses as he does the absolutely unthinkable, the unbelievably god-like thing and takes control of his life: He forgives.

Being able to forgive is, I honestly believe, the single most important quality in a healthy person's happiness. I see it in stark relief as this novel winds its coils around my heart. Kalki, wronged on every level, betrayed and abandoned on every side, used and abused and ripped off...he forgives. And that is the most beautiful thing available for a mortal to do, to give. Come and be healed: Read BLUE-SKINNED GODS. ( )

Powerful. Troubling. Irresistible.

This book will leave you thinking long after you turn the last page.

Kalki is an impossibly blue-skinned boy, ten years old when our story opens, and living on an ashram run by his father deep in the heart of Tamil India. This is a culture with a long history of revering and worshiping many deities (and interestingly, one that also celebrates gender fluidity in their gods with deep and native respect).

Kalki’s influence over the ashram visitors makes it clear that what we believe, what we want to believe, and what values our culture subsidizes may be more important to our health than any medicine which is actually administered.

Is Kalki a god? A ten year old boy-god can be expected to struggle in his role, but Kalki is desperately unhappy, in many (if not most) areas of his life.

How important is faith? And trust? Although childhood-Kalki’s faith in his own godliness continues to be strong, and his motivations to heal and cherish are pure, we quickly see, as Kalki’s story unfolds, the cast of characters around him are indisputably darker in their needs - leaving them victims to the more humanly struggles with power, money, lust, deception, success, depression, fear, jealousy, alcohol and drugs.

There are no easy answers. As Kalki’s story advances in his young adulthood to include a world tour with this father of other cultures including visiting New York, the story reaches its climax. It’s no surprise that what is worshipped as “godhood” across a broad sweep of America is a very complex thing. The author explores the allure of North American influences of freedom, fame, social media success, addiction, hedonism, revenge and sex on our young “god”, leaving the ultimate question(s) raised by this book unanswered:

Just what, at the end of the day, do we worship? And how’s that working out for us?

A very big thank you to NetGalley, the publisher and the author for an advance review copy of this book. All thoughts presented are my own. ( )